Month: March 2005

IBM’s Blue Gene/L computer at the Department of Energy National Nuclear Security Administration has set a new processing speed record, despite still being underconstruction and incomplete.

The Blue Gene/L is currently benchmarked at 135.3 trillion floating points per second. When completed, the computer is expected to have 64,000 IBM Power PC processors, and is expected to reach 360 teraflops.

People wanting to be among the first to pick up a Sony PSP on its release day today (March 24th, 2005), camped out overnight in San Francisco at the Metreon Center to be first in line at 12:01am when the store opened it’s doors.

News.com has an article and pictures of the crowd waiting in the rain last night.

A Sun research group called Barcelona have been working on a prototype of a multitasking version of the Virtual Machine.

A user can today run multiple processes each one in it’s own running VM instance, but this substantially duplicates loading of reseources, libraries, and does not effectively use resources on the host machine.

The prototype from the Sun lab allows multiple Java apps to be executed concurrently within the same VM, each process sharing resources with each other, where possible, and controlled by the VM itself.

NASA have built a suite of applications using the Eclipse Rich Client platform for the Mars Rover programme.

Also of interest is that for the same programme they are using Hibernate with PostgreSQL.