Web Concepts

Posts Tagged ‘chinese’

The new bridge spans Jiaozhou Bay, on the southern coast of China’s Shandong Peninsula in northeastern China. At 26.4 miles long, it beats Louisiana’s Lake Pontchartrain Causeway — the previous world-record holder — by at least 2 miles, according to the Guinness Book of World Records.

Chinese workers toiled at marathon pace to build the bridge in four years, starting at each side and meeting in the middle. The structure has 5,200 pillars and cost at least $2.3 billion, according to Chinese state-run media.

The Guinness officials say the bridge is earthquake- and typhoon-proof, and designed to withstand the impact of a 300,000-ton vessel. It links the port city of Qingdao to the island of Huangdao, cutting drive time from 40 to 20 minutes, according to the state-run China Daily.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune reports that Americans are apparently not giving up the world’s longest title without a fight, however. The newspaper talked to Carlton Dufrechou, general manager of the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, who pointed out that the Jiaozhou bridge has a bend in it, and that the over-water length is only 16 miles, compared to 24 for his bridge.

“Bunch of wannabes,” he said. Read the Times-Pic’s piece for his full take, in which he calls the Chinese news “propaganda.”

In any case, the bridge looks pretty neat, especially set to this haunting soundtrack. Check out some aerial views below.

[via IB Times]

The race for performance-per-watt is on

Officials at China’s Institute of Computing Technology recently announced a summer launch for the country’s first wholly indigenous supercomputer, the Dawning 6000, which will achieve 300 teraflops using 3,000 1 GHz 8-core Godson (also known as Loongson) 3B chips. It’s very efficient at 3.2 gigaflops per watt — or 128 gigaflops using the power of a typical light bulb.

This is possible because of the Godson chip’s relatively low clock speed, at 1.0 GHz, and its use of the old-school 64-bit MIPS architecture, according to HPC Wire.

As computers grow ever more powerful, they also grow more power-hungry, requiring rooms full of cooling systems. So power-sipping supercomputers would be a major advancement. Technology Review predicts performance per watt will become the dominant supercomputer awesomeness metric.

IBM’s new Mira supercomputer, slated to be delivered next year, will be one of the most energy-efficient in the world, thanks to improved chip designs and an efficient water-cooling system. Mira will be built on a Blue Gene/Q platform, currently tops in terms of performance per watt.

But HPC Wire says the Godson platform could give Blue Gene/Q a run for its money. The MIPS architecture is known for high function at low power, which is why MIPS cores can be found in technology ranging from portable video game consoles to wireless routers.

The People’s Republic is performing pretty well in the supercomputing race. Its Tianhe-1A supercomputer is the world’s fastest, achieving 2.507 petaflops via 7,168 NVIDIA GPUs and 14,336 CPU. But those components are made by American companies.

Ultimately, the Godson chips are unlikely to challenge companies like AMD and Intel in western computers. But HPC Wire notes they could cut into those companies’ imports into China.

[Technology Review, HPC Wire]

By drawing on the ever-evolving organism that is the Internet, Engkoo (loosely meaning “English vault” in Chinese) should be able to stay abreast of changes in colloquialisms and idioms in both the source language and the one it is translating to. In theory, it should also be able to catch errors or mistranslations easier, since an error is unlikely to be prevalent across the entire Web.

When a user searches for a word or sentence in either language – Microsoft plans to adapt the system for other languages but this initial phase is focused on Chinese-to-English translation – the software driving Engkoo searches through the database for the relevant data and draws upon statistics to translate as accurately as possible. Where possible it links to the sources where it drew the initial data from and often can provide example sentences for a word or phrase.

Engkoo is also a multimedia experience. Computer generated audio translations exist for many English words and sentences to help Chinese speakers with their pronunciation, and researchers are cultivating a video dictation library so users can see the way native speakers’ lips move as they enunciate.

Next up? Ultrasound images that show the movement of the tongue inside the mouth, a critical step in learning pronunciation but one that is often hidden from plain view. Researchers are already gathering ultrasound data for the library, but those of you who find that kind of imagery less-than-savory, worry not; the black-and-white ultrasounds will be converted into cartoon animation to make them a bit more – how do you say? – palatable.

There’s also a mobile app in the works that will run on Windows phones – other mobile OS types are being considered – that allows for translation on the go. Which means perhaps we’re seeing the first real baby steps toward the universal translator you can keep in your pocket for real-time translation of any language into your own.

[WSJ]