Hasta La Gadget!

If you’re like me, you’re probably starting to amass a collection of flash drives that’s as big as that stack of AOL CDs you had back in the 1990s. But fans of The Simpsons will have to run out immediately and add to their flash drive collection with these fun new storage devices from USBTribe.

The officially-licensed series of keychain flash drives includes big-headed versions of Marge, Lisa, Bart and Homer, cast out of soft rubber. While they only store 8GB of data each, you’re not buying these for the capacity anyhow. In case you’re wondering where the drive is stored, it’s in the head of each of the characters, though I assume that the Homer one is a bit more forgetful than most memory devices.

Simpsons collectors can grab them now over at USBTribe for €19.90 (~$25 USD) each. Now where’s my Ned Flanders and Krusty the Clown drives?

This week the folks at NVIDIA are making it clear that the K20 family of Tesla GPU architecture is ready for action, and riding in on the wave of power comes the Titan – K20 accelerated and named world’s fastest supercomputer just this morning. The Titan supercomputer works with a beastly 18,688 NVIDIA Tesla K20X GPU accelerator units and makes it clear that this family is more than ready to knock the cap off the processing roof in more ways than one. In addition to being the fastest GPU in the world the K20X model working with the Titan has been revealed as the new #1 entry on the Green500 list for energy efficiency.

It’s a big day for NVIDIA with the Tesla K20 architecture being reintroduced in its final form powered by CUDA – also known as “the world’s most pervasive parallel programming model.” NVIDIA backs this claim up with 8,000 institutions with CUDA developers, 1,500,000 CUDA downloads, and a massive 395,000,000 GPUs shipped with CUDA built in. With 629 university courses being taught on CUDA across 62 countries, it’s safe to say that it’s here for some time to come.

The K20 family also makes with the undeniably next-level powerful performance on scientific applications – this being exactly why the Titan supercomputer uses the architecture for the massive bulk of its processes. The 2011 Gordon Bell Winner for computational simulation was 3.1 Petaflops (3.08 Petaflops on K Computer) with NVIDIA’s new effort bringing on 10+ Petaflops here in 2012.

Both the Tesla K20 and the Tesla K20X work with a single GK110 Kepler GPU with your favorite features – Dynamic Parallelism and Hyper-Q! These units have more than one teraflop peak double precision performance and deliver 10 times the performance of a single CPU – this claim by NVIDIA being based on the following: “Ws-lsMs performance comparison between single E5-2687W @ 3.10GHz vs single Tesla K20X. Tesla K20X > 650 gigaflops.”

There’s also a Tesla K10 model out there, you should know, with memory size of 8GB per board and just SMX inside instead of the addition of Dynamic Parallelism and Hyper-Q, which the K20 and K20X have. The K10 (again, having been on the market now for some time,) has a peak double precision floating point performance of 0.19 teraflops and is made for servers only – it’s peak single precision floating point performance, on the other hand, is 4.58 teraflops. The K20 rings in 1.17 teraflops and 3.52 teraflops for double and single precision floating point performance respectively. The K20X nabs 1.31 teraflops and 3.95 teraflops.

The K20 has 5GB memory size per board while the K20X has 6GB, and both devices have just the one GK110 GPU while the K10 has two GK104 units inside. The K20 units are made for massive beastly tasks like financial computing, computational chemistry and physics, and satellite imaging. The K10 on the other hand is made for seismic, image, signal processing, and video analytics.

The NVIDIA Tesla K20 family of GPU accelerators is ready for action this week – shipping today and available for order from your favorite computer store. NVIDIA is working with Appro, ASUS, Cray, Eurotech, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, Quanta Computer, SGI, Supermicro, T-Platforms, Tyan, and NVIDIA reseller partners as well – you’ll have no shortage of choices on your hands. Grab a K20 as fast as you can!

NVIDIA Tesla K20 family reintroduced as world’s most powerful GPU is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

AMD has announced a new server-grade graphics card called the FirePro S10000 will. The graphics card is described as the industry’s most powerful server graphics card and is designed specifically for HPC workloads in graphics intensive applications. AMD says the video card can exceed 1 Tflops of double-precision floating-point performance.

AMD also says that the video card offers 5.19 Tflop of single-precision and 1.48 Tflop of double-precision floating-point calculations. The video card uses AMD’s next-generation Graphics Core Next Architecture. The powerful graphics card is aimed at use in a variety of fields including finance, oil exploration, aeronautics, automotive design and engineering, geophysics, life sciences, medicine, and defense.

The card offers dual GPUs and has high throughput and low latency transfers for quick computing of complex calculations that need high accuracy. The video card has 6GB of GDDR5 RAM and a 384-bit interface. Output options include four mini DisplayPort outputs.

The card also has one standard DVI output. Maximum resolution supported on the card’s DisplayPort 1.2 port is 4096 x 2160 with standard resolution on other outputs being 2560 x 1600. The video card consumes 375 W of power and needs to slots inside a computer. The retail price on the card is $3599.

AMD unveils new FirePro S10000 server graphics card is written by Shane McGlaun & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Whether we like it or not, advertisements are a vital part of our Web browsing experience. It’s what enables us to read, watch or listen to most online content for free, like the website you’re on right now. But sometimes these ads can be intrusive or slow down your browsing experience. Hence the popularity of ad-blocking software like Adblock Plus. Now someone’s come up with a hardware equivalent of such software.

Invented by Chad Russell, the AdTrap is an open-source device that has a wider reach than any ad-blocking program. The AdTrap blocks online ads for all devices – from a desktop computer to a smartphone – in the same network. You simply plug the AdTrap in between your modem and your router, then reset your modem. Any and all ads should be gone when you’re back online.

Fortunately the AdTrap also has a whitelisting feature so you can instruct it to display ads on certain websites – *hint hint* –  or let certain ads through. You can actually do much more than that if you have the know how, because the AdTrap is designed to be hackable.

As of this writing a pledge of at least $99 (USD) on its Kickstarter fundraiser qualifies you for an AdTrap. If this device is successful, I’m guessing Russell and company are going to come out with a router (or a modem-router combo) with AdTrap built-in.

Apple users working with their untouchable Mac computers will be pumped up to see that Mimo Monitors have brought forth a brand new USB powered-and-connected 10.1-inch monitor that works with OS X like a charm! This Mimo Magic Touch monitor is the first of many models that’ll be offered by Mimo Monitors ready to rock with OS X with just a download of a special driver. This model also works with Windows 7 and can be used as a display-only unit for Windows XP, Vista, and 2000.

The Mimo Magic Touch is the first model released by Mimo Monitors to be assured readiness to work with the official Mac OS X Touchscreen Driver distributed by Mimo Monitors as well. This driver works with Intel Macs only and is compatible with systems up to and including OS X Mountain Lion. The driver, incidentally, is an alpha release – but once the final version is ready for action, you’ll get that upgrade for free.

The folks at Mimo Monitors note that “that this software is proprietary and we cannot provide it without charging this nominal license fee.” This is why it’s not free, if you’d like to know. You’ll also get a free downloadable “Gesture Pack” that allows two-finger scroll, pinch / magnify, and rotate gestures galore. You can also download a “trial version” of the software from Mimo Monitors once you’ve got the Mimo Magic Touch if you’d like to be sure you actually want to work with it, too.

The Mimo Magic Touch is also a lovely touchscreen monitor on its own, working with Windows 7 with full touchscreen capabilities with a 1024 x 600 resolution display, an adjustable dock/bast, and connects with USB 2.0. This unit needs to be connected with a USB cord in order to function, but requires JUST the USB cord and no additional display cords to work. Neat stuff! You’ll be picking up the monitor for $299.99 and the driver for $35.00 USD.

Mimo Magic Touch brings touchscreen finesse to OS X is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.