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I think most folks in the /. world consider IT to be the 'tech' industry. Not surprising due to the backgrounds of the people who read/post here. As for 'tech' jobs, there are quite a few in my region of the technology world:

LLNL has 20 open S&E positions.

INEEL in the middle of transitioning contractors, but will undoubtedly need S&Es to complete missions for DOE and the Navy.

LBL has 95 open S&E positions.

BNL has 7 open S&E positions.

SNL has 20 open S&E positions.

LANL has 107 open S&E positions.

ORNL has 28 open S&E positions.

PNNL has 36 open S&E positions.

ANL has 32 open S&E positions.

There complete list of laboratories is here. All of them have job postings in the S&E categories. These just happen to be the largest insitutions.

I haven't even started searching Monster.com

Jim you're on my slashdot friends list but I'm afraid I must completely disagree with you here. :o)

Tokamaks have problems, yes, but I don't think it's known weather these problems will prohibit their utilization as a fusion power source. For instance if a plasma instability forms in a tokamak while running (happens all the time) and the plasma bumps the divertor or the inside of the chamber it most certainly will not be bomb like and won't "result in burn-through" either. The introduction of (relatively) high Z material (carbon from graphite, iron, or aluminum from chamber walls) will result in INSTANT plasma quenching via the plasma radiating a huge portion of its energy through bremsstrahlung. This causes burn marks and other dust problems in the chamber but can't cause burn through of the thick metal vacuum chamber walls. And if there is a catastrophic breach of the plasma vessel it definitely, DEFINITELY will never be anything even close to a "chernobyl-style quarantine". At most, a couple grams of radioactive tritium (3-hydrogen) are contained in the vessel while "burning", even considering a total failure of containment and burnoff (a small explosion, to be sure) of all the hydrogen to form tritiated water (forming molecules of TOH or TOT rather than HOH) the amount of radioisotope release will be in the tens of KiloCurie range. Tritium is the least dangerous radioactive isotope that exists (I work with it daily), with a ~12 year half life and an average beta particle emission energy in the 5KeV range to a max of 18KeV, barely enough to go a few mm in air before being blocked; and owing to the fact that both hydrogen and water are volatile, it will be VERY quickly be evenly dispersed and diluted in the atmosphere and oceans. I doubt anyone working in the plant would die if assuming sufficient containment were used.

Tokamaks do have the issue of neutron activation to worry about among other things but I think these are at least workable problems. Remember, Tokamaks have held the world record for plasma temperatures and containment times for a very long time.

But ultimately you may be right, the Tokamak may prove unworkable from an economic energy generation standpoint. I think the project at MIT using a levatated dipole for more "natural" quiescent plasma containment looks very interesting (promising? maybe), for instance.

All of this said, BIG congratulations to the Sandia Z-machine people!! They deserve it. The energies and powers (~300 Twatts!) they've achieved are barely a factor away from those expected on the finished National Ignition Facility. The lab where I work supplied the parts for the laser called the Z-Beamlet they use to "backlight" targets so they can be viewed in X-rays as they're being imploded on Z. Looks like they've put it to good use. As new technologies like these (and others achieving PETAwatt powers) come online they will open completely new doors to fusion research This is an exciting time for very high energy experimental plasma physics.

Again, you've caught me being sloppy. I'm talking about total system efficiency, not just the efficiency of the individual components. A lead-acid battery is more efficient than electrolysis, but electrolyized hydrogen used in a fuel cell is potentially much more efficient in a working PV generator or vehicle than batteries.

Here's a comprehensive study on lead-acid batteries from Sandia Nat'l Laboratories:

Lead Acid Battery Efficiency Study

The combustion of hydrogen releases energy at higher efficiency than a lead-acid battery, but an internal combustion engine is much less efficient than that (I don't have numbers), thanks to losses in the engine itself, but the difference here is energy density: A tank of compressed hydrogen can store more energy in much less mass than a battery, making it more practical, especially in a vehicle. Fuel cells could theoretically improve the picture a great deal, making hydrogen the winner by a mile (more scientific precision! ;-)

AFAIK, nobody has a economically viable fuel cell that can compete in payback terms with chemical batteries right now. Also, I'm just an interested amateur, I do not work or research in this field!

A good (but light) summary of these issues can be found at http://zebu.uoregon.edu/1999/ph162/l10h.html

Um, can't we make a sustained nuclear fusion reaction right now?

In every particle accelerator since the 70's ...

But it's a negligent yield.

As for energetically and commercially viable reactors, recently neutrons were detected from a fusion pellet using Z-pinch induced hohlraum radiation (ICF). [ press release]

AFAIK this variant on the ICF method holds at least as much promise for a viable reactor as MCF (The Tokamaks and ITERs of the world).

But I must disclaim that I am a grad-student researching Z-pinchs, so I have a natural bias ...

at sandia labs with 4x the projectors. I don't think they have a cool algorithm for the seam matching, like the one in the story though. The neat thing about the sandia one system was what was feeding it - a 64 node cluster that could render realtime 3d visualizations of simulations done on the ASCI super computers. I don't know what the polygon count was on that thing but each projector was 1280x1024 and I couldn't see any corners when looking at a very detailed model (the one shown in the press release actually :).

Umm, I think you are attacking some unrelated generalization you've heard in the past, not the actual poster's comment. He made no statement about hydrogen or solving fossil fuel dependancy.

But, since you are on that topic, there are a number of avenues besides fossil fuel for generating the electricity or heat or whatever for creating hydrogen:

Bacteria. Some scientist at UCLA did some calculations, and determined that a decent sized canyon in the Mojave desert covered 2 feet of water and a sheet to collect the hydrogen produced by the bacteria would be enough for all of Southern California.

Geothermal

Photovoltaics

Tidal

Convection

Fission

Fusion

Biomass Fuels

Solar Thermal

Wind

Hydroelectric

So, who are you swinging your fists at? Certainly not the original poster?

LS

Couldn't this be placed in a more, you know, useful location? I hate to offend the New Mexicanites but why is this not in San Diego where I live?

The albuquerque-Santa Fe metro area not only has two national laboratories Sandia and LANL, but it has a huge INTEL factory in Rio Rancho.

New Mexico also has, despite being named The dumbest state in the US(I dislike harvard...almost as much as I dislike MIT...) New Mexico has the highest concentration of Ph.D.'s in the United States today.

Get real...New Mexico is WAYYYY more relevant than San Diego...besides the Chargers and Aztecs both suck.

Van los lobos, baten a aztecas!

BTW it is New Mexicans, NOT New Mexicanites

The article says that they used ttcp which is a memory-to-memory bandwidth testing program. Most would consider that unrepresentative of reality. On the other hand, today's supercomputers have a tremendous amount of memory (1.2 TB, 6 TB, 10 TB, 33 TB, etc.) so memory to memory is possible.

Others have suggested that disk speeds cannot sustain that rate. However, supercomputer disk arrays can easily keep up (4 GB/s or 32 Gb/s).

Finally, it is possible to achieve nearly the same result (multiple streams instead of a single stream) transfering real data (23.23 Gb/s).

[Bias alert: I am a member of the team that set a previous Internet2 Land Speed Record, Guinness World Record and won the "Bandwidth Lust: Distributed Particle Physics Analysis Using Ultra-High Speed TCP on The Grid" or "Moore's law move over" award at SC2003.]

Now, before you complain that the technology is not available to "mere mortals," let me point out that we first started experimenting with 1 Gb/s Ethernet at work 5 years ago. Now it is readily available at reasonable prices for consumer desktop machines. (Apple has had it standard in G4 desktops for 4 years.) The problem is not with consumer hardware, it is having access to true broadband (not cable modem or DSL), at least in the USA. Although your LAN may support 1 Gb/s, your download speed is limited to 1-3 Mb/s (cable) or 256 -786 Kb/s (DSL). (Your upload speeds are significantly lower.) Since the link provider has very little incentive to upgrade service, I doubt that will change very quickly.

So, yes it is possible. No you can't have it (yet)!

The article says that they used ttcp which is a memory-to-memory bandwidth testing program. Most would consider that unrepresentative of reality. On the other hand, today's supercomputers have a tremendous amount of memory (1.2 TB, 6 TB, 10 TB, 33 TB, etc.) so memory to memory is possible.

Others have suggested that disk speeds cannot sustain that rate. However, supercomputer disk arrays can easily keep up (4 GB/s or 32 Gb/s).

Finally, it is possible to achieve nearly the same result (multiple streams instead of a single stream) transfering real data (23.23 Gb/s).

[Bias alert: I am a member of the team that set a previous Internet2 Land Speed Record, Guinness World Record and won the "Bandwidth Lust: Distributed Particle Physics Analysis Using Ultra-High Speed TCP on The Grid" or "Moore's law move over" award at SC2003.]

Now, before you complain that the technology is not available to "mere mortals," let me point out that we first started experimenting with 1 Gb/s Ethernet at work 5 years ago. Now it is readily available at reasonable prices for consumer desktop machines. (Apple has had it standard in G4 desktops for 4 years.) The problem is not with consumer hardware, it is having access to true broadband (not cable modem or DSL), at least in the USA. Although your LAN may support 1 Gb/s, your download speed is limited to 1-3 Mb/s (cable) or 256 -786 Kb/s (DSL). (Your upload speeds are significantly lower.) Since the link provider has very little incentive to upgrade service, I doubt that will change very quickly.

So, yes it is possible. No you can't have it (yet)!

they could add a whole swiss-army knife's worth of gadgets to the arms on those things.

Hmmm... Sandia and several other US government labs seem to think different. Exactly *what* class of computations can a linux cluster not handle?

UC Irvine

University of Cyprus

Linux supercomputer for Los Alamos

AMD Tapped for Gov. Linux Clusters

Installing, Running and Maintaining Large Linux Clusters at CERN

And more....

The national energy research scientific computing center (NERSC: http://www.nersc.gov ) is actively working on creating computing clusters capable of a petaflop within the next five years (I can't seem to find a reference on their website, but as I understand it, this is one of their oeprating goals.) NERSC facilities are used extensively to model the kinds of processes involved in this sort of fusion as well as others (The z-pinch, for example, http://zpinch.sandia.gov/ ) I'm sure groups are using this facility to do computation for magnetically confined fusion, and certainly all theses tasks are being worked on by other groups. The Princeton Plasma Physics Lab does much work in all these fields, and their website has links to many other sites devoted to plasma and fusion ( http://www.pppl.gov )

Gnoppix UT2003 LiveCD ISO

1. Technologies that were exotic in the 1960's-1970's have had a lot of time to mature since the shuttle fleet was built. While it may not be the Athlon 64, the Government is starting to manufacture
2. Radiation Hard Pentiums. Personally I would be much happier with a updated fleet of space vehicles with technology from the 1990's rather than from the 1970's. As I understand it, it is the cost per pound to lift something in to orbit seems to be a major expense. Hopefully a newer fleet built out of new materials would mean a more efficient system.

Building solar cells requires the use of toxic chemicals and the production of toxic chemical waste. Just like your computer.

There are other forms of solar energy available, one of which is solar towers.

Sandia doesn't mention how many toxic chemicals are used in its creation (if any) and I think that failure to disclose each and every source of possible ecological contamination is a problem (assuming that there's more here than meets the eye).

Another form is solar water heating, used extensively in Barbados for example. (That link is outdated and a tad too financially "comforting" for my tastes. Nonetheless...)

What follows isn't in response to your post, just my views in general on the topic of sustainable living.

I can't and won't defend the financial viability of non-sustainable living because in the end, I value the long-term health and well being of myself and the ones I care for over the amount of money they make. I know health and money have become almost inextricably bound in the capitalist psyche, but the true cost of cleaner sources of energy are of inestimable value to me.

I thought that the main problem with nuclear power was the inability to safely dispose of the radioactive waste. Generally, I'm suspicious of any energy source that doesn't recycle completely. But, ignorance is the enemy, so if anyone knows otherwise, please tell us.

My views may be seen as radical, since I don't yet know to what end humanity is going towards with all of this so-called industrialized "progress". Since I don't think I'm likely to be able to work out why we're on this planet within my lifetime, I think it's only fair to give my descendants a chance to experience this incredible planet in most of its natural beauty. If I could be convinced that we (humanity) are using all of vital resources to find an answer to that question, then maybe I'd defend the right to put money first and people second.

The systems we have for supporting massive populations that don't know how to grow their own food are impractically artificial. I suspect they will collapse, though not necessarily before I die. These systems were not put in place by some magical force. Individuals made decisions. Individuals often faced massive pressures to conform to the status quo and still they decided, for better or worse, not to.

These choices are still ours to make. If no-one ever made a move that wasn't likely to result in monetary profit, I think we'd have destroyed far more planets than we have available to us. The point is, competition for money places too much importance on immediate gain at the expense of long-term benefit. My computer shouldn't be a toxic nightmare to produce and dispose of. If it took another thirty years to create it cleanly, it would've been worth the wait. What's the big rush? Sociopolitical pressures, probably.

Slowing down and doing it right the first time aren't options. Admitting errors early on before irreparable damage can be done aren't options. Creating jobs by creating problems to be solved sounds like the ultimate goal of "progress".

A lot of it seems to boil down to humans trying to "keep up with the Joneses", having more children, building bigger houses etc. in pursuit of some variant of "The American Dream". A dream supported largely by a marketing industry which in turn creates the demand for rampant production of superfluous items and on and on. Reminds me of the beginning neanderthal scenes of "2001": A Space Odyssey". "That's just the way it is" is not an excuse for defending these downward-spiralling infrastructures.

I realise that there's a huge morass of human motives behind these bad decisions, including nationalism, religion, sexism, crime and mental illness, to name a few. Fully deconstructing the human condition isn't the aim of this tex

which uses enormous power hungry electromagnets to compress hydrogen to the point at which it fuses. Unfortunately, this means that even if it is actually capable of producing more power than it consumes (like they claim on the web site) it will be monumentally inefficient compared to more modern fusion reactor designs, like the zMachine

Yep. That's the reason high-speed interconnects such from companies like Mryinet and Quadrics are used for real clusters. It's also the main selling point of Cray's Red Storm.

An what happened to the research on solvent-refined coal?
Apart from the pollution and contamination problems everybody had big expectations. Or? All the research in this area lying dead?

I originally reacted to Jess much the way Black Parrot did, knowing that rete-based rule engines have been around since 1989 or so.

Jess is a rete-based rule engine, but the implementors have done a lot of work on the innards of rete network processing and have made serious order-of-magnitude improvements in matching speed.

{snipe}
They had to - Jess would have been too slow relative to rule engines in native-compiled languages otherwise.
{/snipe}

Seriously, Jess is a real improvement over ancient and revered rule engines like CLIPS. You can find out more about Jess by going straight to the sources at Sandia Labs here.

Jess is very handy, don't get me wrong, and the Java API is great except for one large omission:

Right now the jess.Defrule class does not expose enough public methods to properly create one outside of the jess package.

That's straight out of the latest Jess documentation. You can't construct rules from Java! Well, you can pass a text string to Rete.executeCommand, but this is hardly elegant. Grrr... Am I missing something here? If not, then PLEASE give me a constructor for Defrules, Mr. Friedman-Hill.

It's getting frustrating enough that I've been interested in an open-source alternative to Jess (academic license is no charge, but you have to pay for it for commercial use): drools. This has to be the dumbest project name ever, and I haven't even looked at much of the code yet, but it looks promising. Anybody have any experience with it? Please hold back your drool jokes for now...

I've been optimistic about this diet for my patients as well -- the Mediterranean diet seems to export fairly well into the diet of other cultures. There was a Lancet article on a trial of the Mediterranean diet in India.

I would expect that durability will increase as technology improves.

slashdot did a story a while back on Sandia's 20-Million-Pixel, 130-Square-Foot Screen.

it sure would be fun to build one of those! unfortunately it would also be very expensive...

(i'd be pretty happy "just" with two XGA projectors, in a dual-head config. i've borrowed one from work and brought it home to show DVDs on the wall, which works well, but i've got room for twice as wide a screen....)

Isn't anything MEMS closer to origami than science?

You can read the original press release from Sandia National Labs.

There is also a list of the researcher's publications. If that link doesn't work, try seaching for "Forsythe, James Chris" as author alphabetical at the Sandia Technical Library. Many of his papers are available as PDF online from that site.

You can read the original press release from Sandia National Labs.

There is also a list of the researcher's publications. If that link doesn't work, try seaching for "Forsythe, James Chris" as author alphabetical at the Sandia Technical Library. Many of his papers are available as PDF online from that site.

You can read the original press release from Sandia National Labs.

There is also a list of the researcher's publications. If that link doesn't work, try seaching for "Forsythe, James Chris" as author alphabetical at the Sandia Technical Library. Many of his papers are available as PDF online from that site.

The tungsten filament is replaced with a piece of tungsten machined into a microscopic lattice. When heated, the machined tungsten no longer emits a Planck black-body spectrum. Instead, it now emits more visible light and less infrared light.

Same materials as the existing incandescent bulbs; just being used in a more clever fashion!

<paranoid rant>

You see, GE could give a shit about wind power. All you have to do is follow the money. First of all check out the Energy Policy Act of 2003, as Senator Domenici (NM) promises it will fix a whole laundry list of problems with our energy supply (real and percieved). Do` we really need a new Under Secretary position for energy and science as well as two new Assistant Secretary positions: one for science and one for nuclear energy, I digress.

Anways Being from New Mexico, the home of Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories Don't be so shocked when Domenici's bill is pro nuclear.

Well, John Rice President and CEO GE Power Systems, recently (May 8) sez he's cautiously optimistic that there will be a new nuclear facility in the United States and has spoken with half-dozen major nuclear utilities about building a new reactor .

And I suppose since GE is a member of United States Energy Association and gave about $9 Million in campaign contributions (since 1990), It probably has some say into Domenici's Energy Bill which provisions for up to 8-10 new 1100MW nuclear reactors that The taxpayers (read you and I) would pay, through loans, 50% of the costs to build these. And according to the Congressional Budget Office the risk of default on such a loan guarantee to be very high - well above 50 percent(p.11). The CBO also figures that each of these will cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $3Billion.

< /paranoid rant >

So why the hell would GE develop it's patents on Wind Turbines when the Good Ol US of A is gonna spend $52.6Billion over the next 10 years (p.1) on the Energy Policy Act of 2003.

Just follow the money....

If you look closely at the big image linked on the "new release" page, he's running Gnome on his desktop machine, and what looks like windows 2000 on his laptop.

What's really interesting to me is that I have absolutely no f**king idea what this software is supposed to be doing, other that looking at his eye (and that wasn't even explained in the text).

*f*

Here's the actual press release , which is still short on details, but has passed through a few less dummy filters. I really don't understand why slashdot even bothers posting press releases - they are so devoid of any information the only discusion you can have is pure speculation and jokes, of which the latter is probably the more valuable.

Earth Simulator is impressive in its own reguard, but in no way is the majority of clustering apps going toward these 'specialized' systems. Governments, research labs, etc. want powerful computers that are dirt cheap. Los Alamos's ASCI Q (Installment 1, the Alpha servers) cost over $100,000,000 to build, while their Pink cluster cost about $6,000,000 in hardware. On paper, Pink and ASCI Q are both around 10 teraflops. ASCI Q runs Quadrics on 64-bit 66MHz PCI, Pink is getting an ugprade to Myrinet Lanai 10 on PCI-X (From Lanai 9 on 64/66PCI). Not only that, but Pink runs the open-source, 100% GPL'd Clustermatic software and can be booted in a matter of seconds rather than hours like ASCI Q.

The fact is, systems like ASCI Q and the Earth Simulator just aren't practical. They may look great on paper, but there's not much that they can do that can't be done on x86. Given the choice between paying over a hundred million for a proprietary cluster that might not even be all that reliable (*cough*Q*cough*) and requires expensive software and maintenance contracts, we see companies like Linux Networx offering high-power clusters on common hardware and free software that are a fraction as expensive.

As far as reliability goes, don't get suckered into thinking that proprietary and expensive mean quality. Q's failure rate is almost as high as my old Windows '98 machine hahaha. With the exception of a few missing chillers, Pink seems relatively healthy with only a few minor failures.

If CRAY and NEC want to get into a pissing contest in specs, that's fine. If they offer something that Intel can't, more power to them. Otherwise, the five organizations in the world that own their systems can be proud that they have the most powerful computer on paper for a year or two before someone builds a cheaper x86 cluster that matches or out-performs them.

From what I've heard [anecdotally] computers like the earth simulator go vastly under utilized for the most part.

From my experience that is mostly untrue, yet widely publicized. Yes, if you look at utilization as the (used-proc*sec)/(totaltime*numprocs) the number can be relatively low (~60-70%). However, that includes system time, rebooting the machine, weekends, holidays, etc. Further, when it comes down to it the researchers need to have a reasonable turnaround time during the day for their development runs (when the utilization is much higher than 60%). Further, since these machines generally run jobs of different sizes from many differnt users there is an upper bound on utilization

This high-speed video capture is definitely the way to go for a first step, but of course the situation will be hugely improved when all that data can be taken back to the lab an scanned for drivability by software instead of by human brainpower.

Perhaps when the sun is low shadows would be cast over potholes that would lead to lower temperatures inside the crater than on the surface of the road. That would make infrared cameras an obvious choice for picking out the cold-bottomed potholes.

Or perhaps a rear vehicle could shine a light at an acute angle to the ground that would turn potholes into shadowy pits for easy detection by a forward vehicle on the other side of the pothole?

A lot of the problem was that back then people would run their hypersonic CFD analysis, and some other group of people would run their hypersonic propulsion analysis, and another group would run their hypersonic structural analysis, and the dynamic interactions between these disciplines went uncaptured. These interactions between the disciplines are extremely important once you reach hypersonic speeds. A little bit of vibration in the wing can dramatically change the airflow over it, causing a cascade effect that is often unpredictable. Running the analyses separately means you often don't even realize such an interaction is present until you're very far along into the design process.

This effect is mitigated nowadays by tightly coupling the disciplines together into what is called multi-physics analysis. Since the finite element meshes used to model structures looks very different from the structures used to model airflow, for example, there is a lot of calculation behind the scenes that must correlate structural, thermal, and aerodynamic properties into a cohesive model.

Furthermore, the level of detail (number of nodes & elements in the mesh) required for proper hypersonics analysis is much higher than that of "normal" aircraft design. And, the inherently chaotic nature of hypersonics means that it is very difficult to show meaningful results without good probabilistics. Running probabilistic analysis on something so complex, however, requires serious computing resources. Computing resources even a few years later are many times faster now than they were back then, and many improvements have been made to the structure and methods used in parallelizing this kind of interdisciplinary calculation, such as the development of the SIERRA framework developed at Sandia National Labs.

I'm a Linux user. No I'm really a Linux user. I currently have four machines. I'm running it at as my primary desktop at work and as a server, primary (gaming) workstation, and diskless PVR at home. I've modded my series-one TiVo. I installed slackware in the days when one had to wrangle 13 floppies.

With that in mind, I recently I purchased a maxed out 17" Powerbook on my research funds at work and have been amazed at the quality of MacOS hardware and software. I get the true Unix experience with terminals, perl, X11, ssh, vim, and the rest along with an exceptional GUI. The best part about MacOS is that it just works. I've got a Sun Blade 2000 on my desk that's a pain. I've been trying to install KDE on it for the better part of a month and I paid $3k for a graphics card that's slower than my nVidia GeForce 3. I upgraded SuSE on my home Linux workstation and once again I have to recompile the kernel to stop my mystery lockups. (One of these days I should write down my sound-card settings.) MacOS provides the best user experience of any Unix OS.

Will I get rid of Linux? No. There's a quality-cost trade off that will always guarantee the presence of both. The ratio is a function of the environment and thus the evolutionary stable strategy that the competing systems reach. When will Linux pass MacOS? Both soon and never. Linux, due to its low-cost software and hardware, will outnumber MacOS soon but Linux will never pass MacOS in quality. Ever.

Linux : MacOS :: VW : Mercedes
Michael.

Almost forgot the all-important supporting link.

Concentrating solar power plants produce electric power by converting the sun's energy into high-temperature heat using various mirror configurations. The heat is then channelled through a conventional generator. The plants consist of two parts: one that collects solar energy and converts it to heat, and another that converts heat energy to electricity.

• The Shuttle is not a `space truck'.
  
  It's more of a space Chevy pickup. When I think of trucks, I think of semis--things capable of carrying huge loads over long distances. The Saturn V rocket, the reliable workhorse of the Apollo program, could launch over 250,000 pounds to low Earth orbit or even put men on the moon. The Shuttle, by comparison, can only put 58,000 pounds into low Earth orbit and cannot reach higher orbits. Saturn V rockets made the 250,000-mile trip to the moon not once but several times, while the highest the Shuttle has ever gone is a meager 385 miles (335 nautical miles) during STS-82.
  
  In fact, the Shuttle is so sharply limited that it rarely deploys a satellite directly. Instead, the satellite is mounted to yet another rocket, carried to low orbit in the Shuttle cargo bay, and the second rocket then kicks it into proper orbit. I don't understand the logic: we launch the Shuttle into orbit so we can have astronauts risk life and limb ... launching another rocket into orbit?
• The Shuttle is not reusable.
  
  Endeavour cost $2.1 billion (source) and each launch costs $450 million (source) per mission. Most of that expense is taken up in refurbishing the Shuttle afterwards, where so much of the Shuttle is disassembled, inspected, replaced and reassembled that it's fair to declare it ``rebuilding'' instead of ``refurbishing''.
  
  More than this, not one single flight component of the Shuttle--not one!--has met its original flight rating. For example, the Shuttle's main engines were originally rated for 27,000 seconds of thrust (about 55 flights). After that time, the engines would have to be replaced. This design goal has not been met. As Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman wrote in the official report on the Challenger disaster, ``[t]he engine now requires very frequent maintenance and replacement of important parts, such as turbopumps, bearings, sheet metal housings, etc. ... [t]his is at most ten percent of the original specification.'' An engine with a life expectancy only a tenth what's expected may be replaceable and may be disposable, but it's not reusable.
• Twenty-six launches per year?
  
  Between maintenance, rebuilding and inspections, it's not uncommon for a given shuttle to only go up once a year. In Columbia's case, its final mission was its twenty--eighth flight in twenty--two years of service, and its second since 1999. We are nowhere near 26 launches per year per Shuttle; we aren't even close.
• Cheap?
  
  Hardly. Each launch costs $450 million. Even if the fleet were capable of 26 launches per shuttle per year, there's no way we could afford it. Instead of costing one hundred dollars to put a pound into orbit (as we were promised by NASA in the 1970s), it costs $7,750 ($450 million per flight, divided by 58,000 pounds of cargo). A 7,650%-cost overrun per flight can be read one and only one way: an engineering failure.
  
  By comparison, the Saturn V rocket could put a pound into orbit for $3,500, and a Russian Proton-M for $2,062.
  
  If the official NASA line of $450 million per flight isn't mind--boggling enough ... try dividing the amount spent on the Space Shuttle from its conception through 1993 by the total number of flights over that time period. You get an amortized flight cost of over one billion dollars (``Space Shuttle Value Open to Interpretation'', Aviation Week Forum, July 26 1993).
• Ten vehicles?
  
  The first shuttles cost $1.7 billion. Endeavour cost $2.1 billion

Just sounds like a glorified Z-machine to me.

If you get a Myrinet cluster and run IP over it I think it uses the GM kernel driver which does exactly DMA remote access. The NIC has to be smart enough to handle this of course.

Cplant style clusters do this as well. They also provide an API called Portals which revolves around RDMA. Portals, incidentally, is being used in the Lustre cluster filesystem and is implemented in kernel space for that project. It can use TCP/IP I believe but its not real RDMA.

*sigh* some day all NICs will be smart enough to not interrupt the CPU to do data delivery. That would rock :). But what of security?

Don't know myself.

ah! finally we get to see what it was that infocom's Z-Machine was emulating. pretty impressive i'd say. all that to play Zork on...

This picture (zmachine.jpg) instantly became my new desktop background!

Let me get this straight, they developed this tech with my tax dollars, and are licensing said tech to a company(probably some ex-employee) to make a profit off me, for R&D I paid for in the first place. Yeah, that makes sense. They should release the tech and let the best implementer win.

They have thought of redirecting the heat for "hand warmers" but one of the things heat pipes really buys you is lack of moving parts and fan requirements... in other words, you can use it for silent or even a waterproof computer.

The pipes would have to be tiny in order for capillary action to draw the liquid back through. As you can see in this article, they are the size of fingerprint grooves.

Even with a name like bugnuts, I don't worry about carrying a lighter in my pocket :p

Check AWU about the possibilities at these facilities.

Also, check these:

Sandia

Los Alamos

Argonne

Brookhaven

Pacific Northwest

Lawrence Berkeley

Lawrence Livermore

Oak Ridge

And there are other other national labs that I did not mention.

I'm betting that the lights of the future will be made of the same stuff as the lights of today.

Well, here's one link to a glucose-powered fuel cell. Enjoy!

erm. Slight update on the Cray thing.

They also sell the MTA, a hardware threaded architecture - from the Tera days - and the SV2 is now called the X1. They are also doing an AMD Opteron derived one-off system for Sandia National Laboratories. Though, from what I am hearing, it might not be a one-off system - they're considering productizing it.