corners

One way to access or activate some display- and window-related features in OS X is to use screen hot corners, which you can set up to activate the desired feature by moving your mouse to the respective corner. For example, if you wish to manually activate the screensaver, then you can bind this to a hot corner and then move your mouse there to always activate the screensaver.

Hot corner features can be set up in the Desktop & Screen Saver system preferences by clicking the "Hot Corners..." button at the bottom of the Screen Saver tab, and … Read more

Nvidia chips are now in three of the five fastest supercomputers in the world. How did Nvidia get there so fast?

I spoke with Steve Scott, chief technology officer at Nvidia's Tesla products group, to find out.

First, a quick primer on Tesla and graphics chip-based supercomputing. Tesla processors are basically graphics processing units (GPUs) that have been redesigned for supercomputers. The results are impressive enough that some of the most important supercomputing sites have signed on. The U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, probably the premier U.S. supercomputing site, will use Tesla processors in its next supercomputer,… Read more

Intel is trying to overhaul the supercomputer. The idea is to pack more processing power into less space. The 50-plus core Knights Corner processor is how Intel hopes to make it happen.

Let's be clear. It's not that Intel is necessarily losing the supercomputer race--its Xeon processors still power the vast majority of the world's supercomputers--but supercomputing is changing. And the chip giant's arch rival Nvidia is leading the way, with newfangled supercomputers that increasingly rely on its graphics processing units (GPUs) to do supercomputer calculations more efficiently.

Intel's Knights Corner processor is … Read more

A University of Texas of supercomputer will tap a future Intel chip that contains more than 50 processor cores--the first instance of Intel supplying this novel technology to a commercial computer.

The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) and University of Texas announced today that they will deploy a 10-Petaflop (or 10,000 trillion operations per second) supercomputer dubbed "Stampede."

When it arrives in early 2013, the supercomputer is expected to be among the world's most powerful computers for scientific and financial applications.

Inside will be an Intel chip design codenamed "Knights Corner," which will house … Read more

We've all stood and waited while an inexperienced cashier calls in a supervisor to void a charge or enter a discount in a point-of-sale system that would be more at home in Mission Control than Corner Drugs. The Corner Store application has Mom and Pop in mind. It's a POS system specifically for small retailers, so it's designed to be as easy to use as possible. It supports bar code scanning, cash register hot keys, and customer tracking. Most importantly, it supports secure credit card transactions via major national services.

Corner Store POS uses Microsoft .NET Framework … Read more

Links from Friday's episode of Loaded:

We have first impressions and pricing for the Dell Inspiron Duo.

Virgin Mobile USA offers cheap broadband plans for its MiFi at Walmart.

The 10-inch Archos tablet has started to ship.

The TikTok and LunaTik are some of the more stylish iPod Nano watchbands we've seen.

A woman in China is sentenced to a year in labor camp for a retweet that the government said "disturbed social order."

Scientists at MIT have developed a camera that can photograph around corners.… Read more

China has muscled into the No. 2 spot on the list of the world's fastest supercomputers thanks, in part, to specialized Nvidia graphics chips: a technology that Intel is now pursuing to keep pace with this new trend in high-performance computing.

China's Nebulae supercomputer is located at the recently constructed National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen, and achieved 1.271 petaflops/s (1.271 quadrillion floating point operations per second) running the Linpack benchmark, which put it in the No. 2 spot on the widely reported Top500 list. The latest list was formally presented Monday at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany. (Jaguar, a Cray system at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, retained the top spot.)

Nebulae achieved this "in part due to its Nvidia GPU (graphics processing unit) accelerators...Nebulae reports an impressive theoretical peak capability of almost 3 petaflop/s--the highest ever on the TOP500," according to a press release Friday.

Though Nebulae also uses Intel Xeon processors, those are so-called commodity processors that are also employed in standard server computers. So, Intel--despite canceling its Larrabee graphics chip project--is pursuing a technology that leverages Larrabee R&D. On Monday, Intel said the first product of this kind, code-named Knights Corner, will be made on its future 22-nanometer manufacturing process--using transistor structures as small as 22 billionths of a meter--to pack more than 50 processing cores on a single chip.

On Tuesday, I spoke with Jack Dongarra, Distinguished Professor at University of Tennessee's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and director of the Innovative Computing Laboratory. Dongarra introduced the LINPACK Benchmark, which is used as the primary yardstick to measure supercomputer performance.

Q: Are GPU accelerators in supercomputers a trend we'll see more of in coming years? Jack Dongarra: This looks like this is going to be one of the modes of high-performance computing.… Read more

In yesterday's video blog, we all got a brief glimpse into the impact good winter-specific tires can make when driving on snow and ice. Today's video from Michelin goes into deeper detail on how good winter tires and proper braking techniques can keep you safer when driving on winter weathered roads.

This demonstration video covers comparisons of braking distance between different tire types, emergency or threshold braking techniques, the difference in braking with ABS, cornering, and everything in between. Once again, even if you think you know everything about how to drive your car in the snow, there … Read more

These days, it always seems to come back around to food, and analyzing each other's food issues is pretty enlightening. Here are some tools to appease the inner food critic.

Flint woman invents Corner Cap to keep boxes of food from spilling

World’s smallest microwave also has world’s worst name

Aero Blue Robot prepares to dish out unemployment to Japanese waiters

Chocolate scented calculator is torture for dieters

Hot Dogs to Go (thanks, engnr_chik!)… Read more