Parallel Computing?

Traditionally, software has been written for serial computation:

• To be run on a single computer having a single Central Processing Unit (CPU);
• A problem is broken into a discrete series of instructions.
• Instructions are executed one after another.
• Only one instruction may execute at any moment in time.
  

In the simplest sense, parallel computing is the simultaneous use of multiple compute resources to solve a computational problem:

• To be run using multiple CPUs
• A problem is broken into discrete parts that can be solved concurrently
• Each part is further broken down to a series of instructions
• Instructions from each part execute simultaneously on different CPUs

• he compute resources can include:
  • A single computer with multiple processors;
  • An arbitrary number of computers connected by a network;
  • A combination of both.
• The computational problem usually demonstrates characteristics such as the ability to be:
  • Broken apart into discrete pieces of work that can be solved simultaneously;
  • Execute multiple program instructions at any moment in time;
  • Solved in less time with multiple compute resources than with a single compute resource.

 The Universe is Parallel:

• Parallel computing is an evolution of serial computing that attempts to emulate what has always been the state of affairs in the natural world: many complex, interrelated events happening at the same time, yet within a sequence. For example:

  Galaxy formation Planetary movement Weather and ocean patterns Tectonic plate drift

  Rush hour traffic Automobile assembly line Building a space shuttle Ordering a hamburger at the drive through.

Why Use Parallel Computing?

Main Reasons:

• Save time and/or money: In theory, throwing more resources at a task will shorten its time to completion, with potential cost savings. Parallel clusters can be built from cheap, commodity components.

olve larger problems: Many problems are so large and/or complex that it is impractical or impossible to solve them on a single computer, especially given limited computer memory. For example:

• "Grand Challenge" (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Challenge) problems requiring PetaFLOPS and PetaBytes of computing resources.
• Web search engines/databases processing millions of transactions per second

Provide concurrency: A single compute resource can only do one thing at a time. Multiple computing resources can be doing many things simultaneously. For example, the Access Grid (www.accessgrid.org) provides a global collaboration network where people from around the world can meet and conduct work "virtually".

New Windows Phone software

Microsoft today showed off the next version of its Windows Phone 7 software, code-named Mango, that includes 500 new features, including smoother integration with social-networking programs, built-in voice-to-text and text-to-voice support for hands-free use, and the ability to run one application while another is working in the background.
"We set out to make the smartphone smarter and easier," Andy Lees, president of the Mobile Communications Business at Microsoft, said at the end of a news conference in New York City this morning.

The software giant said Mango will be available this fall.

The challenge for Microsoft will be living up to the hype created prior to the announcement. Holding an event in New York and encouraging media attendance comes with expectations. And it stumbled early, with the video feed of the press conference bogging down and not loading for many Web watchers, greeting them instead with a screen with a bar slowly loading the video feed.

The company announced plenty of new features, including a version of Internet Explorer 9 for the phone. It introduced a program called Local Scout that offers hyper-local search results, based on a user's location, and recommends nearby restaurants, shopping, and activities. And it's created a new feature called Quick Cards, which provides a brief summary of relevant information and related apps when users search for a product, movie, or event.

Some of the other new features include:
• Threads: Gives users the ability to switch between text, Facebook chat, and Windows Live Messenger within one conversation.
• Groups: Lets users compile contacts in one place so they can see the latest status updates from the start screen and quickly text, e-mail, or instant-message the whole group.
• Linked inbox: Puts multiple e-mail accounts in one linked inbox.
• App Connect: Deepens the integration between apps and search so that applications surface when they are relevant to a user's Web search query.

Windows Phone has had a rough start. Launched in 2010, the mobile-phone software has yet to make any sort of dent in the leads held by Apple's iOS and Google's Android. Just last week, market research firm Gartner found that of the 100 million smartphones sold worldwide in the first quarter, only 1.6 million of them ran Windows Phone 7. Android, which had just 9.6 percent of the market a year earlier, soared to 36 percent of the market, while Apple held a 16.8 percent share.

No doubt that some of that has to do with the botched efforts to update the Windows Phone 7 software. When Microsoft sent out software to prepare phones for updating in February, some devices failed. Microsoft pulled the update to fix some bugs. But even the follow-up update crashed devices. Microsoft Corporate Vice President Joe Belfiore later apologized for the problems, citing a "lack of preparation."

Even little hiccups hurt. At Mix11, Microsoft announced that the popular game Angry Birds would come to the Windows Phone marketplace on May 25. But last week, news broke that the game would now ship on June 29.

Microsoft is hoping new devices will help right the ship. In February, the company announced a broad partnership with the world's top mobile handset maker, Nokia, to run Windows Phone 7 software on its devices. The first of those devices could roll out before the end of the year. And at the New York press conference, Microsoft announced three new phone partners: Acer, Fujitsu, and ZTE.

The quality of the phones created by those partners, as well as current Windows Phone 7 handset makers HTC, Samsung and LG, will matter as much, if not more, than the cool new features Microsoft announced. Apple has an ironclad grip on the high-end of the market, with its slick iPhones remaining the lust-worthy choice among folks willing to shell out big dollars. And Google's Android has secured the market for customers who aren't willing to shell out as much for a full-featured smartphone.

The current batch of Windows Phone 7 devices offer sleek looks and smooth software. But mobile-phone buyers haven't found them to be enough better than rivals to switch in big numbers.

So while the scores of new features that Microsoft demonstrated in New York look interesting, it's the handful of features that the devices don't have that often matter most. There's no Windows Phone 7 handset, for example, that has a forward-facing camera. That makes using a new video-conferencing Skype app, which Lees said would be coming to the platform soon, an audio-only experience.

Then, there's the matter of applications. Microsoft trumpeted that its marketplace now has 18,000 apps for users to download. The company proudly noted the number, saying the marketplace only opened for business in October. But users don't care about how quickly the store has grown.

They want the best apps possible. And having a wide selection matters too. And it turns out that Apple now has 500,000 apps approved for its iOS platform. Apple benefits from the network effect--the more folks who use iPhones, the more developers want to create applications for it. The Windows Phone platform isn't big enough yet to generate that sort of virtuous cycle.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Tech-Bites/170517173002647

Coke Studio Season 4

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Treebot tackles trunks, branches inchworm-style

We've seen robots that can slither up a tree and shimmy up telephone poles, and now engineers in Hong Kong have developed one that can crawl up trees autonomously.

Treebot is the work of Tin Lun Lam, Yangsheng Xu, and colleagues at the Advanced Robotics Lab in The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

It was designed to demonstrate how an autonomous robot can implement path and motion-planning algorithms.

A paper about Treebot was presented recently at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (ICRA) in Shanghai.

It uses grippers and tactile sensors attached to its Slinky-style body to slowly move its front, then its back, up a trunk like an inchworm.

Although it lacks sophisticated sensors, Treebot can pick the best path to follow up a tree, and handle angled trunks, branches, and payloads of 3.8 pounds.

It can also climb different kinds of trees and various trunk diameters, even the smooth, slender trunks of bamboo.

In the sped-up video below, Treebot emits mechanical noises that make it sound like some sort of arboreal creature.

The History of Computers from 1st till 2011

Computers have wedged themselves into every facet of our lives—they are what we would use as the symbolic representation of the modern world.

But did you know that the history of computers dates back to the 1800s?

Indeed, the history and evolution of computers is quite extraordinary—and with many early computing technology innovations tied to defense contracts, much of this information were kept secret from the public for decades. In this article, we explore the development and progression of computers.

Mid-1800s-1930s: Early Mechanical Computers

The first computers were designed by Charles Babbage in the mid-1800s, and are sometimes collectively known as the Babbage Engines. These include the Difference Engine No. 1, the Analytical Engine, and the Difference Engine No. 2.

The Difference Engine was constructed from designs by Charles Babbage. Photo by Allan J. Cronin

These early computers were never completed during Babbage’s lifetime, but their complete designs were preserved. Eventually, one was built in 2002.

While these early mechanical computers bore little resemblance to the computers in use today, they paved the way for a number of technologies that are used by modern computers, or were instrumental in their development. These concepts include of the idea of separating storage from processing, the logical structure of computers, and the way that data and instructions are inputted and outputted.

Other important mechanical computers are the Automatic Electrical Tabulating Machine—which was used in the U.S. Census of 1890 to handle data from more than 62 million Americans—and the first binary computer: Konrad Zuse’s Z1, which was developed in 1938 and was the precursor to the first electro-mechanical computer.

1930s: Electro-Mechanical Computers

Electro-mechanical computers generally worked with relays and/or vacuum tubes, which could be used as switches.

Some electro-mechanical computers—such as the Differential Analyzer built in 1930—used purely mechanical internals but employed electric motors to power them.

These early electro-mechanical computers were either analog or were digital—such as the Model K and the Complex Number Calculator, both produced by George Stibitz.

Stibitz, by the way, was also responsible for the first remote access computing, done at a conference at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. He took a teleprinter to the conference, leaving his computer in New York City, and then proceeded to take problems posed by the audience. He then entered the problems on the keypad of his teleprinter, which outputted the answers afterward.

It was during the development of these early electro-mechanical computers that many of the technologies and concepts still used today were first developed. The Z3, a descendent of the Z1 developed by Konrad Zuse, was one such pioneering computer. The Z3 used floating-point numbers in computations and was the first program-controlled digital computer.

Other electro-mechanical computers included Bombes, which were used during WWII to decrypt German codes.

1940s: Electronic Computers

The first electronic computers were developed during the World War II, with the earliest of those being the Colossus. The Colossus was developed to decrypt secret German codes during the war. It used vacuum tubes and paper tape and could perform a number of Boolean (e.g. true/false, yes/no) logical operations.

Another notable early electronic computer was nicknamed "The Baby" (officially known as the Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine). While the computer itself wasn’t remarkable—it was the first computer to use the Williams Tube, a type ofrandom access memory (RAM) that used a cathode-ray tube.

Some early electronic computers used decimal numeric systems (such as the ENIAC and the Harvard Mark 1), while others—like the Atanasoff-Berry Computer and the Colossus Mark 2—used binary systems. With the exception of the Atanasoff-Berry Computer, all the major models were programmable, either using punch cards, patch cables and switches, or through stored programs in memory.

1950s: The First Commercial Computers

The first commercially available computers came in the 1950s. While computing up until this time had mainly focused on scientific, mathematical, and defense capabilities, new computers were designed for business functions, such as banking and accounting.

The J. Lyons Company, which was a British catering firm, invested heavily in some of these early computers. In 1951, LEO (Lyons Electronic Office) became the first computer to run a regular routine office job. By November of that year, they were using the LEO to run a weekly bakery valuations job.

The UNIVAC was the first mass-produced computer.

The UNIVAC was the first commercial computer developed in the U.S., with its first unit delivered to the U.S. Census Bureau. It was the first mass-produced computer, with more than 45 units eventually produced and sold.

The IBM 701 was another notable development in early commercial computing; it was the first mainframe computer produced by IBM. It was around the same time that theFortran programming language was being developed (for the 704).

The IBM 650 would cost you $4 million dollars if you bought it today.

A smaller IBM 650 was developed in the mid-1950s, and was popular due to its smaller size and footprint (it still weighed over 900kg, with a separate 1350kg power supply).

They cost the equivalent of almost $4 million today (adjusted for inflation).

Mid-1950s: Transistor Computers

The development of transistors led to the replacement of vacuum tubes, and resulted in significantly smaller computers. In the beginning, they were less reliable than the vacuum tubes they replaced, but they also consumed significantly less power.

These transistors also led to developments in computer peripherals. The first disk drive, the IBM 350 RAMAC, was the first of these introduced in 1956. Remote terminals also became more common with these second-generation computers.

1960s: The Microchip and the Microprocessor

The microchip (or integrated circuit) is one of the most important advances in computing technology. Many overlaps in history existed between microchip-based computers and transistor-based computers throughout the 1960s, and even into the early 1970s.

The microchip spurred the production of minicomputers and microcomputers, which were small and inexpensive enough for small businesses and even individuals to own. The microchip also led to the microprocessor, another breakthrough technology that was important in the development of the personal computer.

There were three microprocessor designs that came out at about the same time. The first was produced by Intel (the 4004). Soon after, models from Texas Instruments (the TMS 1000) and Garret AiResearch (the Central Air Data Computer, or CADC) followed.

The first processors were 4-bit, but 8-bit models quickly followed by 1972.

16-bit models were produced in 1973, and 32-bit models soon followed. AT&T Bell Labs created the first fully 32-bit single-chip microprocessor, which used 32-bit buses, 32-bit data paths, and 32-bit addresses, in 1980.

The first 64-bit microprocessors were in use in the early 1990s in some markets, though they didn’t appear in the PC market until the early 2000s.

1970s: Personal Computers

The first personal computers were built in the early 1970s. Most of these were limited-production runs, and worked based on small-scale integrated circuits and multi-chip CPUs.

The Altair 8800 was the first popular computer using a single-chip microprocessor. It was also sold in kit form to electronics hobbyists, meaning purchasers had to assemble their own computers.

Clones of this machine quickly cropped up, and soon there was an entire market based on the design and architecture of the 8800. It also spawned a club based around hobbyist computer builders, the Homebrew Computer Club.

1977 saw the rise of the "Trinity" (based on a reference in Byte magazine): the Commodore PET, the Apple II, and the Tandy Corporation’s TRS-80. These three computer models eventually went on to sell millions.

These early PCs had between 4kB and 48kB of RAM. The Apple II was the only one with a full-color, graphics-capable display, and eventually became the best-seller among the trinity, with more than 4 million units sold.

1980s-1990s: The Early Notebooks and Laptops

One particularly notable development in the 1980s was the advent of the commercially available portable computer.

The first of these was the Osborne 1, in 1981. It had a tiny 5" monitor and was large and heavy compared to modern laptops (weighing in at 23.5 pounds). Portable computers continued to develop, though, and eventually became streamlined and easily portable, as the notebooks we have today are.

These early portable computers were portable only in the most technical sense of the word. Generally, they were anywhere from the size of a large electric typewriter to the size of a suitcase.

The first laptop with a flip form factor, was produced in 1982, but the first portable computer that was actually marketed as a "laptop" was the Gavilan SC in 1983.

Early models had monochrome displays, though there were color displays available starting in 1984 (the Commodore SX-64).

Laptops grew in popularity as they became smaller and lighter. By 1988, displays had reached VGA resolution, and by 1993 they had 256-color screens. From there, resolutions and colors progressed quickly. Other hardware features added during the 1990s and early 2000s included high-capacity hard drives and optical drives.

Laptops are generally broken down into a three different categories:

• Desktop replacements
• Standard notebooks
• Subnotebooks

Desktop replacements are usually larger, with displays of 15-17" and performance comparable with some better desktop computers.

Standard notebooks usually have displays of 13-15" and are a good compromise between performance and portability.

Subnotebooks, including netbooks, have displays smaller than 13" and fewer features than standard notebooks.

2000s: The Rise of Mobile Computing

Mobile computing is one of the most recent major milestones in the history of computers.

Many smartphones today have higher processor speeds and more memory than desktop PCs had even ten years ago. With phones like the iPhone and the Motorola Droid, it’s becoming possible to perform most of the functions once reserved for desktop PCs from anywhere.

Mobile computing really got its start in the 1980s, with the pocket PCs of the era. These were something like a cross between a calculator, a small home computer and a PDA. They largely fell out of favor by the 1990s. During the 1990s, PDAs (Personal Digital Assistant) became popular.

A number of manufacturers had models, including Apple and Palm. The main feature PDAs had that not all pocket PCs had was a touchscreen interface. PDAs are still manufactured and used today, though they’ve largely been replaced by smartphones.

Smartphones have truly revolutionized mobile computing. Most basic computing functions can now be done on a smartphone, such as email, browsing the internet, and uploading photos and videos.

Late 2000s: Netbooks

Another recent progression in computing history is the development of netbook computers. Netbooks are smaller and more portable than standard laptops, while still being capable of performing most functions average computer users need (using the Internet, managing email, and using basic office programs). Some netbooks go as far as to have not only built-in WiFi capabilities, but also built-in mobile broadband connectivity options.

The first mass-produced netbook was the Asus Eee PC 700, released in 2007. They were originally released in Asia, but were released in the US not long afterward.

Other manufacturers quickly followed suit, releasing additional models throughout 2008 and 2009.

One of the main advantages of netbooks is their lower cost (generally ranging from around US$200-$600). Some mobile broadband providers have even offered netbooks for free with an extended service contract. Comcast also had a promotion in 2009 that offered a free netbook when you signed up for their cable internet services.

Most netbooks now come with Windows or Linux installed, and soon, there will be Android-based netbooks available from Asus and other manufacturers.

The history of computing spans nearly two centuries at this point, much longer than most people realize. From the mechanical computers of the 1800s to the room-sized mainframes of the mid-20th century, all the way up to the netbooks and smartphones of today, computers have evolved radically throughout their history.

The past 100 years have brought technological leaps and bounds to computing, and there’s no telling what the next 100 years might bring.

More Windows 8 leaks reveal cloud syncing

More details about Microsoft's upcoming Windows 8 have apparently leaked onto the Web, revealing new surprises and some makeovers to existing features.

A greater peek into the next version of Windows is coming from Windows 8 Milestone 1, also known as Build 7850, which started popping up at various FTP and file-sharing sites last week. This build was released to Microsoft partners late last year. Milestone 2 has since been released, while Milestone 3 has reportedly been compiled. But combined with details from more recent builds, Windows users can get a glimpse into what the future may hold.

One new feature, reportedly first revealed by the Italian Web site Windows8Italia.com (Google Translate version), is a cloud synchronization tool. The feature would let users sync files and folders from their local PCs with a cloud-based service. Liveside.net sees this as confirmation that Windows 8 will include integration with Windows Live accounts, though it's as yet unknown whether this would directly tap into Windows Live SkyDrive to store data.

Another feature, also reportedly uncovered by Windows8Italia.com (Google Translate version), is a hybrid boot option. This feature is designed to reduce your PCs bootup time after you shut it down by putting it in a form of hibernation. CNET sister site ZDNet reports on this as an evolution of the current hibernation function that puts the core operating system files to sleep.Windows 8 Center sees this as a setting for more advanced users and one that changes the shutdown process more than the start-up routine.

Yet another new feature revealed would allow users to carry Windows 8 with them on a USB drive. As described by Windows 8 Center, this portable workspace, or Windows on a stick option, would let people load a bootable copy of Windows 8 from a USB device and may be geared toward business users who could take their corporate version of Windows 8 with them from the job to work at home.

Beyond these and other new features, Windows 8 users should also see improvements to some old standbys.

The Windows Task Manager, which lets you view and manage open programs and processes, will apparently get a much-needed retrofit. Combining the current Task Manager with Microsoft's Resource Monitor, according to WinRumors, the new and advanced Task Manager would provide more details on running processes and system resources and offer a better way to shut down a misbehaving application.

The Windows Disk Cleanup tool, which can help get rid of unnecessary or duplicate files, will also apparently be beefed up. Based on information and a screenshot published by Windows 8 Center, the revamped tool would provide users with more options for cleaning up their drives and show how much space is taken up by specific types of files, such as videos and music.