ByAdminonMonday 09 June 2008 - 21:45:07

An American military supercomputer, assembled from components originally designed for video game machines, has reached a long-sought-after computing milestone by processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second.

The new machine is more than twice as fast as the previous fastest supercomputer, the I.B.M. BlueGene/L, which is based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

The new $133 million supercomputer, called Roadrunner in a reference to the state bird of New Mexico, was devised and built by engineers and scientists at I.B.M. and Los Alamos National Laboratory, based in Los Alamos, N.M. It will be used principally to solve classified military problems to ensure that the nation’s stockpile of nuclear weapons will continue to work correctly as they age. The Roadrunner will simulate the behavior of the weapons in the first fraction of a second during an explosion.

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ByAdminonMonday 09 June 2008 - 21:40:08

ASUS, producer of top-notch LCD monitor displays, has announced the worldwide availability of ASUS EzLink Displays that will include the new ASUS VW223B and VW202B LCD monitors. This new series will allow users to transfer digital video signals from a PC to one or more LCD monitors via a USB 2.0 interface – providing great flexibility for multi-screen applications.

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ByAdminonMonday 09 June 2008 - 21:35:27

Asus was showing off two new gaming notebooks and it looks like the company is starting to catch on in terms of design. Gone is most of the tacky suff from the previous gaming notebooks, and we're now looking at a couple of really sturdy models for the serious gamer.

Starting with the G50V, this might be the more exciting of the two, simply because it has a 15.6in WXGA 3D display. The great news is that you don't need any glasses and you don't have to squint or focus at some strange point in the distance for it to work, although you do have to look quite straight into the display for best effect.

The 3D display can be switched on or off, although the demo machine was an early sample, so it was done via an external switch, but Asus is working on a software solution to solve this problem. If this isn't enough to get you sold, how about the hardware specifications?

You're looking at a Geforce 9700M GT graphics card with 512MB of GDDR3 memory and HDMI, Intel's upcoming Centrino 2 platform with the mobile PM45 chipset and an option for WiMAX. On top of this you get support for up to 4GB of DDR2 800MHz memory, two 320GB SATA drives and a sturdier keyboard designed for gamers.

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