India Aims To Take The "World's Fastest Supercomputer" Crown By 2017

The Department of Energy's Sequoia Supercomputer NNSA

 

 A plan submitted to the government asks for a nearly $900 million investment that would produce an exaflop-rated machine 61 times faster than the world's current fastest supercomputer.

   

The proposal, which calls for an investment of more than $870 million over five years, claims that it can rocket India to the very peak of the TOP500 list, the twice-a-year tallying of the fastest computing platforms in the world.

 

That machine is currently Sequoia, an IBM-built supercomputer. It has demonstrated 16.32-petaflop speeds. A petaflop represents a thousand trillion floating point operations per second. The next step up is an exaflop-capable machine that can execute one quintillion operations per second. One exaflop is equivalent to a thousand petaflops.

Jumping to the exaflop scale in just five years would truly be a leap forward for India. It’s current highest-ranking machine on the global TOP500 is in the 58th position, but when it comes to computing India has historically proven scrappy and ready to innovate on its own. 

 

The Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), the agency behind the proposal, was established in the late 1980s after it was stonewalled by the West in its attempt to purchase advanced supercomputing systems. 

While India’s homegrown supercomputing industry hasn’t dominated the field the way the U.S., China, Japan, and Europe have, it has certainly kept India in the running even without the technology transfers it sometimes desired.

 If adopted, the plan could set a course for India to climb further up the TOP500 rankings. And if anyone has the chops to plow ahead in this field with or without help from abroad, it’s India.

                                                                                                                         -Akarshi Taneja

An Accessory That Replaces Mouse Movements With Hand Waves

Conducting Orchestras by simply waving the fingers.

It has been nearly 50 years since Douglas Engelbart, an Engineer at the Stanford Research Institute, invented the first Computer Mouse. Since then, his basic point-and-click input scheme has remained fundamentally unchanged. Even the trackpads and touchscreens  work on the same guiding principle.

Now Leap Motion, a San Francisco company, is aiming to reinvent human-computer interaction. It's three-inch-long motion-capture device, known simply as the Leap.  It allows the user to control the computers and manipulate onscreen objects by just waving their fingers.

Connected to any Windows or Mac OS X computer, the Leap uses a combination of infrared LEDs and 1.3-megapixel camera sensors to monitor movement in an 8-cubic-foot field. Leap’s software runs custom algorithms to convert what the device sees into a 3-D map of the user’s hands.

The system detects movements as small as one-hundredth of a millimeter.The Leap is small enough for manufacturers to integrate into existing laptops and tablets, which could happen as early as next spring.

Out of the box, the Leap will be able to take over basic onscreen navigation.. Leap Motion plans to ship the first round of devices to software developers and will eventually launch a dedicated app store. Developers have already proposed apps for sculpting virtual clay, conducting orchestras and even translating sign language into text.

The Leap

Dimensions 3 by 1 by 0.3 inches
Range 8 cubic feet
Price $70
Availability February 2013


                                                                                                                        -Akarshi A Taneja

Samsung  has been ordered to pay over $1 billion for copying Apple iPhone and iPad

 

Samsung copies & Apple claims that it destroyed email evidence in "me too" filing.

A court in America found that the company had copied the critical features of the iPhone and iPad's software and design. It means Samsung could even be banned from selling certain products that are believed to be copies of Apple's technology. The company said it would be appealing against the verdict.

The jury awarded Apple $1 billion in damages—an amount that could be tripled because Samsung is deemed to have “willfully” copied some aspects of Apple’s wildly popular iPhone and its iPad tablet computer.

Exactly what is Samsung alleged to have “COPIED”?

• Like Apple, Samsung also allowed users to enlarge documents by tapping the screen.

• They incorporated “bouncing back” feature when you reach the bottom of the screen (the “rubber band”).

• Samsung made a distinction between single finger and multi-finger actions (e.g. zooming with a two-finger “pinch” gesture.)

• Samsung infringed on the shape of and the colour of the iPhone (and was found guilty of separate patent violation for black and white iPhones).

• Some Samsung icons were similar to Apple’s, and had similar rounded edges

Each of these feature was patented by Apple, allowed under the patent laws, and led to the damages against Samsung of over a billion dollars.

                                                                                                                   -Akarshi Taneja

The 182m statue of The Iron Man of India, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel will surpass the tallest statue in the world currently, which is China’s Spring Temple Buddha at 128m. The Ushiku Daibtsu of the Buddha is in Japan at 110 metres. The Statue of Liberty in New York stands at 93 metres.

The proposed 182-metre high statue of Sardar Patel downstream of the Narmada dam will cost Rs 2,000 crore as against earlier estimates of Rs 1,000 crore.

The Sardar Sarovar Narmada Nigam Ltd (SSNNL) has invited expressions of interest from reputed consultants for the project. Burj Khalifa - Samsung Construction & Technology - takes up the project.

The state government proposes to rope in Gujarati diaspora, top business houses and general public to collect money for the project.

While officials in the SSNNL claimed money may not be a problem, a top aide of chief minister Narendra Modi said, "One has to take into account cost escalation while building such kind of a statue. It is possible that by the time the state government floats tenders, the cost of the project would have escalated to Rs 2,500 crore".

The Gujarat government has collected Rs 55 crore for the high-profile project. Of this, Rs 50 crore has been collected from different state public sector undertakings, while Rs 5 crore has been contributed by Adani group. The PSUs have provided money from their corporate social responsibility funds.

Called Statue of Unity, to be built on Sadhu island which is about 3.5 km downstream of Narmada dam, the state government has formed Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Rashtriya Ekta Trust to implement the project.

As per the official note, the consultant will be required to do overall area planning, including spaces for hospitality, health, education, convention and training centres, development and formulation of tourism plan and provide technical and managerial assistance for bids to invite EPC contract.

                                                                                                                         -Akarshi Taneja

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First ever integrated solar power tile launched in Kochi Kerala

The Amrita Centre for Nanosciences has come out with  the world's first integrated solar power storage tile using super capacitor.

It has been named 'Amrita Smart' and was launched on Friday at the ongoing International Conference, NANOSOLAR 2012, organised by the Amrita Centre for Nanosciences at the Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences.

The product has been developed at the Amrita Centre by its team of 40 researchers headed by Shanti Nair and Vinod Gopal.

Amrita Smart is a combination device of a solar cell and a battery that can be used to power devices even at night. The patented concept uses special electronics to integrate the solar cell with the storage device.
 
The products are capable of charging a laptop or a mobile phone and their use can be extended for building integrated solar storage and usage (home use) at night without the need for expensive battery systems.

These solar modules, when exposed to sun for four hours, can later charge the laptops and mobile phones in two hours and can have seven days' storage capacity.

The product would weigh 200 gms and is expected to be marketed in one to two years. Shanti Nair said that energy generation and storage must go hand in hand.

"The development of the solar storage tile is a milestone in nano solar aided research and in the field of renewable energy sector," said Nair.

                                                                                                                          - Akarshi Taneja