KEY POINTS:
In carefully air-conditioned rooms worldwide, hundreds of super-computers churn through trillions of calculations working in fields as diverse as medical research and animated movies.
An updated list of the top 500 super-computers was released last week and, while dominated by the United States, which holds four of the five most powerful super-computers in the world, it was satisfying to see the University of Canterbury get a mention in a respectable 99th place. The university has named the new machine Blue Fern. Weta Digital once made the list when its IBM server farm in Wellington was expanded to handle the graphic-processing tasks for the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
The university bought an IBM Blue Gene/L super-computer in May for an undisclosed sum, but likely to be upwards of $10 million. It will be installed in July. The Australians don't have one of these grunty machines, which are usually found in better funded universities like Princeton, Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. If you strip the list down to educational institutions only, Canterbury ranks in the top 25, an impressive feat that shows the university's desire to be a research hub in the Southern Hemisphere.
While the super-computer will be based in Canterbury, educational institutions around the country will be able to use its massive processing power. The MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology, Victoria University and AUT University are founding members of the Blue Fern project. With TelstraClear having a contract to set up KAREN - the Kiwi Advanced Research and Education Network - large volumes of information can now more easily be sent to Christchurch for Blue Fern's scrutiny. Blue Fern can process huge amounts of data quickly, providing answers for highly mathematical research programmes faster than previously.
For instance, MacDiarmid is working in the vastly complicated field of nano-technology, in which several sciences happen at a nano-scale, requiring more computing power for modelling and equation solving. Canterbury will use Blue Fern to model blood flows in the human brain as part of research into the causes of strokes and diabetes.
Blue Fern will be a national treasure, and it begins its journey to New Zealand as rivalry among super-computer makers intensifies.
IBM still makes the fast super-computer - the Blue Gene/L, at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California - but Hewlett-Packard now has more super-computers in operation, according to the Top 500.
The Blue Gene/L super-computer can perform 280.6 trillion operations, known as teraflops, per second over a sustained period. However, even it is being left behind in the search for greater computing power. IBM last week unveiled plans for the Blue Gene/P which will boost processing power by three times. IBM is talking about an optimised Blue Gene/P being able to handle 1000 trillion (one petaflop) calculations per second.
Meanwhile, realising the huge strategic advantage computer makers with strong market share in the super-computer market have, Sun Micro-system is building one it claims will rival the Blue Gene/P. The Constellation is being built in Austin, Texas, at a cost of tens of millions of dollars and will go up against the Blue Gene/P later in the year to determine which has the bigger brain.
One concern is the power such computers use, but the benefit is scientific work at a remarkable pace. It's good to know NZ scientists will have a machine in their own backyard they can harness to join in the quest.
Top five super-computers
1. IBM, 131,072, US Department of Energy, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
2. IBM, 40,960, IBM Thomas J Watson Research Center.
3. IBM, 12,208, DOE/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
4. Silicon Graphics Inc, 10,160, NASA Ames Research Center.
5. Bull SA, 8,704, Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique (CEA) in France.
* www.top500.org
Cyber-camera with an edge
With the rise of broadband, web camera video sessions are now quite bearable. No longer do you regularly get the pixilated mess we were used to when we connected for video-conferencing over dial-up connections using less sophisticated software.
Now web cameras are going the same way as mobile phones, incorporating, high-end optical lenses to boost the experience further. Web camera maker Logitech has struck an exclusive deal with Carl Zeiss to feature its lenses in the new Logitech web cameras.
We're talking about video recording at 30 frames per second, a two megapixel image sensor, 960 x 720 pixels and a three-second auto-focus refresh rate. See your far-flung friends in better clarity than ever before.
The cameras are set to debut in the United States priced from US$100 ($130).
* www.logitech.com
