roadrunners

Area 51 is one of the most enduring mysteries and sources of speculation in American history.

Located inside the Nevada Test and Training Range, the flat, dry lake bed known as Groom Lake has been the home to some of the nation's most advanced espionage and weapons technology, hair-raising tales of Cold War brinksmanship, and possibly much worse, according to a new book about the top-secret military base.

In writing "Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base," Annie Jacobsen combed through thousands of pages of declassified material on American spy plane development, nuclear testing at Area 51, and the history of the CIA and Air Force's control of the base.

In the course of her research, she interviewed dozens of men who worked or lived at Area 51 and are only now talking to one another and the public about their time there. She also interviewed one anonymous source who suggested a deeply dark side of the research conducted at Area 51: human experimentation and psychological warfare (and, of course, a high-level cover-up).

I interviewed Jacobsen, along with Jim Friedman, who was a senior field administrator at Area 51 for 13 years, and TD Barnes, a radar specialist who lived and worked at Area 51, in Nevada near the edge of the enormous testing range and base. We drove up to the gate at Area 51, talked at length about the planes and other technologies developed there and dug into the controversy surrounding the most shocking parts of Jacobsen's book.

The interviews and footage originally aired on CBS' "The Early Show," and these three videos are extra footage and longer interviews about the topics covered in the book. First, a journey down the long Nevada highway and desolate dirt road that leads to the back gate at Area 51: the most intimidating gate you've ever seen. When we got there, there was broken glass on the ground, an ominous camera gazing down at us, and absolutely no one in sight. But I could feel the weight of eyes on me with every moment we were there (and I expected a blow-dart in the back at any second!). … Read more

IBM will release a radical new chip next year that will go into a University of Illinois supercomputer in a quest to build what may become the world's fastest supercomputer.

That university's supercomputer center is a storied place, home to both famous fictional and real supercomputers. The notorious HAL 9000 sentient supercomputer in "2001: A Space Odyssey" was built in Urbana, Illinois, presumably on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus.

Though not aspiring to artificial intelligence, the IBM Blue Waters project supercomputer, like the HAL 9000 series, will be able to do massively complex calculations in an instant and, like HAL, be built in Urbana-Champaign. It is being housed in a special building on the Urbana-Champaign campus specifically for the computer that will theoretically be capable of achieving 10 petaflops, about 10 times as fast as the fastest supercomputer today. (A petaflop is 1 quadrillion floating point operations per second, a key indicator of supercomputer performance.)

Part of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois, it will be the largest publicly accessible supercomputer in the world when it's turned on sometime in 2011.

Supercomputers are essentially a large collection of microprocessors acting in concert on a complex problem. As processor designs go, the upcoming Blue Waters' IBM Power7 processor--due in the first half of 2010--is a big step for IBM: the processor integrates the features of a chip used in its "Roadrunner" supercomputer, which has often been ranked as the fastest supercomputer in the world. Power7 fuses the flagship Power chip design with key technology from a separate "Cell" processor--the latter was part of IBM's Roadrunner system at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, according to Bradley McCredie, an IBM Fellow in the Systems and Technology Group.

"We took some of that genetic material from the Cell program--ways to do floating point (calculations)--and embedded that right into the Power7 core," McCredie said in an interview with CNET.

But that's not the only thing that makes the Power7 chip special. It integrates eight processing cores in one chip package and each core can execute four tasks--called "threads"--turning an individual chip into a virtual 32-core processor. As a yardstick, Intel's high-end Xeon processors typically have two threads per processing core.

IBM is also using novel memory technology. Widely used "static" RAM memory, used as the on-chip memory in almost all processors today, can add as much as a billion transistors to high-end processors. IBM wanted to avoid these ballooning--and costly--chip counts and elected to use a technology called E-DRAM, keeping the total number of transistors to 1.2 billion. "The equivalent number of transistors if we had done all of the cache in (static RAM) is well in excess of two billion," McCredie said.

And the chip's speed? Between… Read more

The Cray XT5 supercomputer known as "Jaguar" has finally clawed its way to the title of fastest computer in the world.

Sitting back at No. 2 on the Top500 list of supercomputers for more than a year, Jaguar overtook IBM's "Roadrunner" according to the twice-yearly list that will be unveiled Tuesday at the SC09 Conference in Portland, Ore.

Jaguar beat out the competition by showing it can process 1.75 petaflop/s, or quadrillions of floating point operations per second, according to the Top500 Linpack benchmark. IBM's Roadrunner was pushed back to No. 2 … Read more

Physicist Tanmoy Bhattacharya and HIV researcher Bette Korber are creating an evolutionary genetic family tree based on samples taken by the international Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology consortium, in order to compare the evolutionary history of more than 10,000 sequences from more than 400 people with HIV.

If they can identify common features of the virus as it is transmitted, researchers might be able to create a vaccine that recognizes the virus before the body's immune system reacts to--and mutates--it.

What already sounds like a lot of data, however, could balloon further, hence the importance of Roadrunner. &… Read more

Despite the Jaguar nipping at its heels, Roadrunner continues to speed past the supercomputing pack.

That's according to the twice yearly Top500 list of the fastest supercomputers in the world, which is to be announced Tuesday morning at the 2009 International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany. The list is released in June and November every year.

The IBM supercomputer housed at the Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory, known as Roadrunner, maintains the lead it grabbed a year ago. The computer can process 1.105 petaflop/s, or quadrillions of floating point operations per second, according to … Read more

Intel Xeon processors--particularly the "Harpertown" variety--dominated the top 500 supercomputer list. But IBM's Power chips made a strong showing as usual at the very top of the list. AMD's Opteron processor landed in the No. 1 and No. 4 ranked systems.

The Top500 List--updated twice a year--of supercomputers was released Wednesday. Intel's Xeon, AMD's Opteron, and IBM's Power chips vied for most of the spots in the list.

The most dominant chip was the Intel Xeon E54xx series "Harpertown" processor. Appearing in 116 systems for 23.2 percent of the … Read more

We keep hearing that body conduction technology is the way of the future, usually in the form of sending soundwaves through bones, though some extremists apparently would like to turn the human race into walking routers. Usually the technology manifests itself as some kind of passive skull-vibrating headset, even under water, but rarely does it involve any kind of voice application. Now, after viewing the photo accompanying this item, we may know why. The "Roadrunner" Bluetooth headgear may indeed be effective when talking in a crowded room or in a convertible with the top down, as Gadget Review … Read more