US military makes world's fastest supercomputer

A US military supercomputer, assembled from components originally designed for video game machines, has reached a long-sought-after computing milestone by processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second.

It has out beaten the IBM BlueGene/L, which is based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California

Thomas P D'Agostino, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said that if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day.

The $133 million supercomputer, called Roadrunner in a reference to the state bird of New Mexico, was devised and built by engineers and scientists at IBM and Los Alamos National Laboratory.

It will be used principally to solve classified military problems to ensure that the nation's stockpile of nuclear weapons will continue to work correctly as they age.

Before it is placed in a classified environment, it will also be used to explore scientific problems like climate change. The greater speed of the Roadrunner will make it possible for scientists to test global climate models with higher accuracy.

The high-performance computing goal, known as a petaflop - one thousand trillion calculations per second - has long been viewed as a crucial milestone by military, technical and scientific organisations in the US, as well as a growing group including Japan, China and the EU.

The Roadrunner

The Roadrunner is based on a radical design that includes 12,960 chips that are an improved version of an IBM Cell microprocessor, a parallel processing chip originally created for Sony's PlayStation 3 video-game machine.

"Roadrunner tells us about what will happen in the next decade," said Horst Simon, associate laboratory director for computer science at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "Technology is coming from the consumer electronics market and the innovation is happening first in terms of cellphones and embedded electronics."

Roadrunner, which consumes roughly three megawatts of power, or about the power required by a large suburban shopping center, requires three separate programming tools because it has three types of processors. Programmers have to figure out how to keep all of the 116,640 processor cores in the machine occupied simultaneously in order for it to run effectively.

Many executives and scientists see Roadrunner as an example of the resurgence of the US in supercomputing.

Scientists develop wonder glass that regenerates bones

A new kind of glass will enable patients to re-grow bones by dissolving and releasing calcium into the body, possibly making bone transplants redundant.

The porous glass, developed by scientists at Imperial College here, dissolves in the body and stimulates bone growth, without leaving any toxic residue.

Specific concentrations of soluble silica and calcium ions in the glass activate genes that encode proteins controlling the bone cell cycle and differentiation of the cell to form bone matrix and rapid mineralization of bone nodules.

The gene is activated only when the timing sequence of a cell cycle is matched by that of the glass surface reactions and controlled release of ions.

“To allow people to remain active, and to contribute to society for longer, the need for new materials to replace and repair worn out and damaged tissues becomes ever more important,” the researchers said.

Canada first in the world to pass climate act

The Canadian House of Commons has become the first parliament in the world to pass a climate act, which commits the country to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent from 1990 levels by 2050.

The House passed the Climate Change Accountability Bill Wednesday(June 4 2008). It was moved by the leader of the opposition New Democratic Party (NDP) Jack Layton.

The two other opposition parties - the Liberal party and the Bloc Quebecois - supported the bill.

"This is a world first," Layton said in a statement later.

"Our legislation sets tough but achievable targets that will ensure Canada does its share to avoid the dangerous two-degree increase in average global temperature that scientists warn us about," he said.

To ensure that Canada meets long-term pollution reduction targets, short and medium-term targets are also enshrined in the law, the opposition leader said.

The bill sets an interim target of 25 percent reduction in greenhouse gases by 2020 and requires progress reports from the government every five years.

However, the minority Conservative party government is adamant on its own environment plan, which aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent, below 2006 levels, by 2020.

But Layton said his bill enshrines "targets endorsed by world leaders".

"Instead of looking back and dwelling on past targets, missed because of the inaction of previous governments," he said his party was looking forward to a sustainable future for Canada's economy.

What's new in Internet Explorer 8

Microsoft has kept development of Internet Explorer 8 pretty quiet, but already the next major version of the most widely-used browser is available for downloading in a beta version.

While the focus of IE 7 was on security and the incorporation of a tabbed interface, version 8's main features centre on stability and usability.

In terms of stability, IE 8's new automatic crash recovery feature is designed to solve one major problem that most IE users know all too well. Today, when an IE window or tab freezes or crashes, other browsers instances or tabs will likely become inoperable as well.

Automatic crash recovery does a better job of isolating instances of the IE browser - or separate tabs within the same browser - so that one stalled browser or tab can be terminated without affecting any other.

If a crash does bring down the entire browser, automatic crash recovery will attempt to restore the browser to its previous state - including all open tabs - the next time you open it.

Greater stability is fine - but ultimately boring. Luckily, that's not all IE 8 has going for it. The new browser's usability features will generate the most buzz - and are likely to tempt lots of folks to give IE 8 a try.

The new Activities feature, for instance, attempts to save you a lot of time by cutting down on the number of separate sites that you have to visit to accomplish a task. In essence, the Activities feature allows you to invoke the essential services offered on separate sites without ever leaving the page you're currently on.

Let's say, for example, that you're reading a web page and you see an address for a restaurant you'd like to visit.

Activities feature

Today, in order to get directions to that address, you would probably go to a mapping site and type or paste the address in and then wait for the service to provide you with a map from, say, your apartment to the restaurant.

The process is time-consuming and involves at least two browser windows and tabs, plus a bit of copying a pasting.

With IE 8's Activities feature, when you select the address, a small Activities button appears next to your mouse cursor. Clicking that Activities button brings up a context-sensitive menu of possible activities, with one of the options being the ability to map the tool using your favourite mapping site.

Selecting that mapping option actually invokes the mapping site in a smaller preview window inside the current browser tab.

Another Activity might pull from a review site of restaurants, allowing you to see what others have said about the restaurant without your having to visit another site.

The Activities feature was also created with a nod toward the growing popularity of social networking sites. Just as you can pull services from other sites, the Activities feature also allows you to push information to popular networking sites such as Facebook and Digg.

If you want to refer a friend to the page from which you got the address for the restaurant, for instance, you can select the Send to Facebook option on the Activities menu, and IE 8 will log you into Facebook, send the URL to Facebook, and present you with the Facebook page that allows you to add an entry.

A set of default Activities comes with the IE 8 browser, but you easily customise the service providers that appear on your Activities list.

Web Slices

Another time-saving feature of IE 8 is called Web Slices, which are designed to allow you to subscribe to frequently-updated portions, or "slices," of certain websites.

Instead of spending your time visiting three or four websites to get updated information from a portion of each of those sites, you would simply use Web Slices to pull that information into a single location in IE 8.

A site such as eBay, for instance, lends itself to the Web Slices feature.

Say, for instance, that you are running or watching several auctions on eBay. Typically, you would visit eBay multiple times per day to check the status of those auctions.

With Web Slices, you can instead simply subscribe to a section of the auction page by clicking a Web Slice icon that appears when you allow your mouse cursor to hover over a portion of a site that is frequently updated.

Clicking the Web Slice icon adds a new button to a Favorites bar that appears above your browser tabs. Clicking the newly-created Web Slice button on the IE 8 Favourites bar will pull the latest data from your subscribed page and show it to you in a preview window.

You can visit the page itself merely by clicking a link within the preview window.

As with Activities, Web Slice-enabled sections of sites must be made available by web site owners themselves. The code for doing so is fairly simple and non-proprietary, however, so it will likely simply be a matter of time before many sites become "IE 8 aware" and users start seeing the Activities and Web Slices icons as they surf their favorite sites.

Click here to download IE 8 Beta