Posts Tagged ‘world record’
China Unveils 2.507-Petaflop Supercomputer, the World’s Fastest
Tianhe-1A was designed by the National University of Defense Technology in China, but like the XT5 Jaguar it will be operated as an open access system for high-powered, large scale scientific computations. Costing $88 million, Tianhe-1A weighs 155 tons and consumes 4.04 megawatts of electricity.
That sounds like a lot of power, but for what Tianhe-1A is capable of it’s actually pretty efficient. By integrating GPUs (graphic processing units) versus CPUs (central processing units, or your basic microprocessors) cuts power consumption substantially, making it three times more efficient that a CPU-only computer with the same performance (such a computer would require more than 50,000 CPUs, according to NVIDIA).
Where can China get that much power? Maybe from the Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest hydroelectric project, which also reached maximum generating capacity this week. There’s no word if China plans to build a space elevator, perfect the cold fusion process, and win the World Series before the week is out, but we suspect the Chinese have people diligently working on it.
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Zoomable 45-Gigapixel Panorama of Dubai Sets Record as World’s Largest Digital Photo
The shot was captured over more than three hours using a Canon 7D mounted to a robotic GigaPan camera mount that uses imaging technology similar to that found on NASA's Mars rovers. The sweeping shot is actually 4,250 individual shots cobbled together seamlessly with Autopano stitching software.
Said Donovan: "This was intended as a technical test. It was about exploring the limits of the hardware and software out there."
Which raises the question: Did we find the limit? The last record-holding digital panorama came in at 26 gigapixels, so the Dubai image is a significant advance. Given the fact that the image is composite, it's really not a matter of camera hardware; the robotic mount and the camera could, theoretically, snap more than 4,250 individual shots of a landscape. So it's really a matter of software and the processing power needed to stitch together the larger images. Which means that if the tools to make a larger digital pic don't exist yet, they certainly will at some point.
And what good is a record if it's never broken? In the meantime, check out an interactive version of the image on . If you think the image above looks like any other panorama, zoom in. And zoom in some more. If this is the closest you ever get to Dubai, it's still really, really close.