Hardware Dev Story Tech

Titan supercomputer to be loaded with ‘world’s fastest’ storage system

As reported on Engadget. By Alexis Santos If you figured Titan’s title of the world’s most powerful supercomputer would give the folks at Oakridge National Laboratory reason to rest on their laurels, you’d be mistaken. The computer is set to have its fleet of 18,688 NVIDIA K20 GPUs and equal number of AMD Opteron processors paired with what’s said to be the planet’s speediest storage system, making its file setup six times faster and giving it three times more capacity. Dubbed Spider…

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Application Social Networking Story Tech

Facebook Home And The Promise Of Android

As reported on TechCrunch. by SARAH PEREZ If you’re an iPhone user, you might be feeling a little left behind, because Facebook launched an application called Facebook Home, touted by CEO Mark Zuckerberg as the “next version of Facebook.” In fact, you might be feeling this way if you’re an Android user, too. For now, only a handful of select devices can even run Home (officially) — notably missing from the lineup is Google’s Nexus 4, the latest in the lineup of…

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Article Tech

Now That We Have All These Devices, It’s Time For Them To Truly Work Together

As reported on TechCrunch. by DARRELL ETHERINGTON Cross-platform is the buzzword of all the big tech companies now. During every Google earnings call, like clockwork, CEO Larry Page dedicates considerable time discussing the company’s focus on making sure users have a seamless experience and equal access to services as they switch between devices. In general, that’s already a reality if you know where to look. But there’s so much more potential. No matter how much apps talk…

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Business Hardware Dev Tech

HP Moonshot server class leaves concept, to power commercial-grade internet of the future

As reported on Engadget. By Ben Gilbert We’re all about the future of the internet here at Engadget, so you can imagine our excitement when HP today announced that it’s shooting for the moon with its latest server system, the HP Moonshot. Promising significantly reduced energy consumption and space requirements, the Moonshot is HP’s “second generation” server tech, and it’s intended for use with “social, cloud, mobile, and big data,” according to the company. In so many words,…

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Story Tech Trends

The Power And Weakness That Come With Being The Default

As reported on TechCrunch. by DREW OLANOFF Facebook had its big coming-out party for mobile on Wednesday, and its Home launcher will soon start shipping exclusively on an HTC device. This is the social network’s first crack at being the default experience on any device. Until now, using Facebook has been a completely optional and background experience, meaning you’d have to visit its website or download one of its apps. After nine years, that approach worked rather well, to…

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History Tech

Bill Gates, 18-year-old Harvard freshman, is looking for a job

As reported on The Verge. By Sam Byford The event that saw Microsoft co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen pose for a classic photo reenactment has turned up another gem from the pair’s early history. Seattle’s Living Computer Museum held a gathering last night for many of founder Paul Allen’s friends and fellow technological luminaries, and it also managed to dig up Gates’ and Allen’s pre-Microsoft resumes. At the time Gates was a freshman at Harvard; he said he’d be…

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Business Retail Sales Tech

Samsung partners with Best Buy to bring Experience Shops to 1,400 stores Mobile

As reported on Engadget. By Brad Molen Not content with a gazillion Galaxy phone sales, Samsung is hoping to continue winning the smartphone war in one of the biggest battlegrounds any manufacturer can face: retail. The Korean OEM has partnered with Best Buy to bring its Experience Shops to the big box retailer nationwide — 1,400 of them by early summer (with 900 launching this month), to be precise. So what does Sammy hope to achieve? In addition to the…

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Culture Mobile Tech Trends

It’s been 40 years since the world’s first mobile phone call Mobile

As reported on Engadget. By Mat Smith On April 3rd 1973, Martin Cooper made the first mobile call on the nine-inch (and 28-ounce) Motorola DynaTAC. Dialing up a rival at AT&T, he apparently said that he was ringing “to see if my call sounds good at your end.” While briefcase-size models had come before it, it’s Motorola’s truly mobile phone that became the go-to power accessory for the likes of Gordon Gekko, Zack Morris and, er, American Psycho‘s Patrick Bateman.…

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Cloud Hardware Dev Story Tech

IBM Roadrunner retires from the supercomputer race

As reported on Engadget. By Jon Fingas For all the money and effort poured into supercomputers, their lifespans can be brutally short. See IBM’s Roadrunner as a textbook example: the 116,640-core cluster was smashing records just five years ago, and yet it’s already considered so behind the times that Los Alamos National Laboratory is taking it out of action today. Don’t mourn too much for the one-time legend, however. The blend of Opteron andCell processors proved instrumental to understanding energy flow in weapons while…

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Application Hardware Dev Science Tech

Heavy weather: why we need supercomputers to teach us how clouds and climate change work

As reported on The Verge. By Carl Franzen There’s still no clear forecast for Earth’s temperature rise, but scientists are looking to the sky for answers There’s a dark cloud hanging over the science of climate change, quite literally. Scientists today have access to supercomputers capable of running advanced simulations of Earth’s climate hundreds of years into the future, accounting for millions of tiny variables. But even with all that equipment and training, they still can’t…

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