Nvidia boss: cloud, ¡Si! Intel, ¡No!

GTC Nvidia chief exec Jen-Hsun Huang sees the computer industry on the cusp of radical changes. And with his company now about 65 per cent devoted to parallel computing, you can easily guess which technology he believes will drive that transformation — and which company he believes will lose.

“Whatever capability you think you have today, it’s nothing compared to what you’re going to have in a couple years,” he told the assembled multitude at a “Fireside Chat” Thursday morning at the GPU Technology Conference in San José, California.

That capability will be provided by parallel computing — or, as he told his keynote audience on Tuesday, “parallel computing, GPU computing, accelerated computing, heterogeneous computing — however you guys want to describe it.”

Key to the transformation, in Huang’s view, will be supercomputers up in the cloud, responding to queries from personal clients.

Although “cloud” is the buzzword du jour, in Huang’s view you ain’t seen nothing yet. “If yo

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Oracle bigs up 7000 ZFS storage line

Oracle has supercharged its 7000 unified storage line, effectively replacing two of the products and expanding the line’s performance and capacity dramatically upwards. Users will get more scalability and more performance from the new line.

The new products have been rebranded too, and are known as the ZFS Storage Appliance line with four models: 7120; 7320; 7420; and 7720. The previous line had three models: 7110 scaling to 4.2TB; 7310 scaling to 192TB with a 2-node cluster option; and 7410 scaling to 576TB and again having a 2-node cluster configuration. Both the 7310 and 7410 have up to 600GB of read flash buffering and could have optional write flash buffering too.

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Avatar 2.0: Eyes on with Micoy’s 360-degree 3D Projection Technology

Near the entrance of the GPU Conference is an odd-looking inflatable hemisphere–at first glance, I thought Nvidia had brought in a Moon bounce for its conference–but it houses a new technology that lets you project 3D images in a full 360-degree environment.

“It’s the closest thing in reality to the holodeck,” says Don Pierce, the president and founder of Micoy.

Current 3D technology seen in theaters–think Avatar–is based on projecting an image to a flat screen. Therefore, th

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IE 9 and HTML 5 Enable 3D Sites, Taskbar Alerts, Drawing Apps, More

Today at the Internet Explorer 9 Beta launch event, two dozen representatives from well-known Web sites and less-well-known Web development firms sat in front of large screen monitors, demonstrating new interactive features that IE 9 has enabled them to deploy. While many of the HTML 5 and CSS 3-enabled pages will work reasonably well on a few other browsers, many of the sites we saw took advantage of unique IE 9 features and all benefit from the new browser’s hardware acceleration. Here are some of our favorites.

USA Today Sliding Slideshow

The popular newspaper recently posted an amazing slideshow with before and after photos of areas that were ravaged by Katrina, both 5 years ago during the hurricane and today. R

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Intel eats crow on software RAID

IDF When Intel releases its Sandy Bridge-based two-socket “Romley” platform in the middle of next year, its “Patsburg” platform controller hub (PCH) will include support for serial attached SCSI (SAS).

By putting SAS support on the motherboard, Intel is embracing what it formerly shunned: software RAID.

“I’ll plead guilty. We stood up here 10 years ago and told you software RAID sucked, you didn’t want it, it wasn’t a viable solution,” Susan Bobholz of Intel’s storage product marketing group told attendees at a Wednesday SAS and RAID session at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco.

“But that’s one of those things that’s starting to change in the industry,” she added.

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