Slashdot Mirror
Domain: ua.ac.be
Stories and comments across the archive that link to ua.ac.be.
Stories · 5
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FASTRA II Puts 13 GPUs In a Desktop Supercomputer
An anonymous reader writes "Last year tomography researchers of the ASTRA group at the University of Antwerp developed a desktop supercomputer with four NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2 graphics cards. The performance of the FASTRA GPGPU system was amazing; it was slightly faster than the university's 512-core supercomputer and cost less than 4000EUR. Today the researchers announce FASTRA II, a new 6000EUR GPGPU computing beast with six dual-GPU NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 graphics cards and one GeForce GTX 275. The development of the new system was more complicated and there are still some stability issues, but tests reveal the 13 GPUs deliver 3.75x more performance than the old system. For the tomography reconstruction calculations these researchers need to do, the compact FASTRA II is four times faster than the university's supercomputer cluster, while being roughly 300 times more energy efficient." -
Free Online Scientific Repository Hits Milestone
ocean_soul writes "Last week the free and open access repository for scientific (mainly physics but also math, computer sciences...) papers arXiv got past 500,000 different papers, not counting older versions of the same article. Especially for physicists, it is the number-one resource for the latest scientific results. Most researchers publish their papers on arXiv before they are published in a 'normal' journal. A famous example is Grisha Perelman, who published his award-winning paper exclusively on arXiv." -
Supercomputer Built With 8 GPUs
FnH writes "Researchers at the University of Antwerp in Belgium have created a new supercomputer with standard gaming hardware. The system uses four NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2 graphics cards, costs less than €4,000 to build, and delivers roughly the same performance as a supercomputer cluster consisting of hundreds of PCs. This new system is used by the ASTRA research group, part of the Vision Lab of the University of Antwerp, to develop new computational methods for tomography. The guys explain the eight NVIDIA GPUs deliver the same performance for their work as more than 300 Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz processors. On a normal desktop PC their tomography tasks would take several weeks but on this NVIDIA-based supercomputer it only takes a couple of hours. The NVIDIA graphics cards do the job very efficiently and consume a lot less power than a supercomputer cluster." -
On Implementing Effective Internet Protests?
andr0meda asks: "The ecology activist group Friends of the Earth is protesting against the recent dimissal of the Kyoto Protocol by President Bush, on the grounds of protecting the current economic momentum. It is a valid reason on it's own, but given that the US is the strongest economy in the world, this is a little out of place. My question is wheather these kind of internet protests can have effect on any policy. In Inet-land, there are no stable, validated channels that are really used to examine the public opinion. You can`t strike or protest-march on the internet. There is no e-government. You can only ruin (or hope to ruin) someone's mail system or network in order to stand out from the crowd. So my issue is twofold: 1) what can you do to effectively protest on the internet without harming anyone or anything? 2) Does free-speech and subsequent opinion-chaos mean you have to break the system to augment the potential importance of your discourse? Then again, maybe I should be worried more about the Slashdot Effect on the website. (In the meantime, you are of course welcome to join in on the protest)" While the internet is great for organizing such things, I think protests are best felt in meatspace, where such actions have more weight. -
Carmack About Q3A On Dreamcast
andr0meda writes: "C|Net's GameCenter recently interviewed John Carmack about Q3A's Dreamcast conversion. The interview was conducted after the QuakeCon talk John gave last weekend, which was Slashdotted earlier. Here are both parts of the lengthy interview: [1,2]"