C-DAC unveils India’s fastest supercomputer

 

Precise weather forecasting, faster tapping of natural resources in the sea and designing of customised drugs for individuals will now be possible using Param Yuva II, India's fastest supercomputer. Developed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Param Yuva II was inaugurated by J Satyanarayana, secretary, department of electronics and information technology, here on Friday.

The supercomputer has been upgraded to 524 teraflops, about 10 times faster than the present facility. With an investment of Rs 16 crore, it was developed in a record three months.

Param Yuva II will also give a boost to research in space and bioinformatics, among others. Developing research-based applications will take lesser time than before and complex problems will be solved in a simpler way. For instance, if it takes about 18 to 20 years to discover a new drug now — from designing to testing — Param Yuva II will help reduce this time to 15 years. The supercomputer would also help in reducing the time-frame in weather predictions. If researchers currently collect satellite data to predict the conditions for a six-km region, the supercomputer could help cover a wider region, may be up to 10 km.

About 300 people from the C-DAC team were involved in the making of the supercomputer, which also promises to be energy efficient with 35% reduction in energy consumption as compared to the earlier facility.

Satyanarayana said, "The facility is a stepping stone for the petaflop version of the supercomputer that India has envisioned. What we need to do now is speak to users, researchers and scientists and take feedback from them on the issues relating to usage of the facility and help them in accelerating their research work for the benefit of common man."

C-DAC director general Rajat Moona said, "Although we initiated the project in June 2012, we only intended that it would upgrade the facility. However, we later realised that it could be upgraded to half-a-petaflop (524 teraflop) and we achieved this within three months."

Moona said, "The list of top 500 supercomputers in the world is released twice in a year, in June and November. Had we launched Param Yuva II in November, it would have been in the 62nd position."

Petaflop by December? 

J Satyanarayana, secretary, department of electronics and information technology, said their next target was the petaflop capacity supercomputer which should be ready by December. "This is part of our continuous process of upgrading the supercomputing facility in the country. It will be quite a challenge. The facility will be developed by C-DAC which has the expertise. Once we are able to develop that, we will be among the topmost countries in supercomputing capabilities," he said. 

The department of electronics and information and technology will commission this project to C-DAC once it gets the Prime Minister's nod. The project was recently forwarded to the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) by the Union ministry of human resource and development. The project may cost about Rs 5,000 crore. Other countries currently having the petaflop supercomputing facility include Japan, the US and China. 

Power consumption reduced by 35% 

While developing Param Yuva II, the C-DAC researchers used a hybrid architecture with the help of Intel that enables high performance at low power consumption. Pradeep K Sinha, chief coordinator, research and development, C-DAC , said, "The biggest problem faced by supercomputers today all over the world is the amount of power it consumes. Hence, many are turning towards green technology. While developing Param Yuva II, one of our major focuses was also to have this hybrid technology for which we tied up with Intel." The technology used for the supercomputer is called 'Genome 5'. Earlier, the entire system consumed 750 MW power but with the hybrid technology, the supercomputer consumes 600 MW power. 

Efficiency of Param Yuva II 

Aircraft designing 

The supercomputer will give further insight into better designing of an aircraft to manufacturers and designers as per airflow. The new facility will help them with more parameters of designing an aircraft which includes weather conditions, speed and direction of airflow, among others, which would help them design a better structure for the Boeing. 

Drug discovery 

Ideally, bringing a drug into the market takes about 18 to 20 years of research. This research involves designing and testing of the drug several times. Param Yuva II will reduce this time span to 15 years. 

Weather 

If scientists are presently able to forecast a natural calamity like a flood a week in advance, this facility would help scientists predict the same probably a fortnight before so that a warnings can be issued in the region concerned and proactive steps are taken to save families from the disaster.

 

Source:Internet

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Intel launches the Yolo, its first smartphone for Africa

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Intel's chips for smartphones have made strides since we first reviewed them last year, but it's still fairly rare to find one in the wild. So what is Intel telling people who might take a gamble on a more niche processor? Yolo. Released through carrier Safaricom, the Yolo is Intel's first African smartphone, as well as the first phone we've seen to use the Lexington Atom chip Intel announced at CES. Despite what will jump to mind for most of us, the name is a nod to the Lava Xolo X900, the very first Intel phone. The Xolo was announced for India in mid-2012, while the Yolo is now coming to Kenya.
The Yolo is based on Intel's reference design from CES, with a 3.5-inch screen and 1.2GHz processor; if it follows the specs we saw there, it'll have a pretty minimal 320 x 240 display and dual SIM support. According to a reviewer at Techweez, who also took the photo above, the phone runs Ice Cream Sandwich and supports HSPA+. Intel's chips can offer longer battery life without sacrificing performance, though we found Lexington sluggish at CES. The company is targeting developing markets with Lexington, sidestepping the problems with LTE support it's encountered elsewhere. The Yolo will sell for 10,999 Kenyan shillings, or about $125. There's no word on whether it will start showing up in other countries in the future, though Intel said at CES that multiple companies were working on Lexington phones.
Source:Internet

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Intel to Introduce Budget Android Smartphones in India

US chip maker Intel has entered into partnership with smatphone makers of India to introduce budget Android handsets in the country by mid 2013, said new reports.

According to an Android OS report, Intel is planning to expand its market visibility with smartphones that are powered by Intel processors. It was said that the company will foray into the market with handsets which would cost less than Rs 7,000 each.
"The first handset with Lava that we launched was a premium one. We learnt that it was important to have a portfolio and offer choice to the user. We will not have entry-level handsets but our smartphone range will be priced upwards of Rs 7, 000," said Debjani Ghosh, Intel South Asia Managing Director, Sales and Marketing to the Press Trust of India.

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Intel developing supercomputer-strength smartphone chip

One day a phone like this one could have a chip with 48 cores, according to Intel.

Intel researchers are developing a 48-core processor for smartphones and tablets, something that could potentially give users the capabilities of a supercomputer (or, at the very least, a mainstream PC) in their hands. According to a report from Computerworld, Intel researchers in Barcelona are "working on finding new ways to use and manage many cores in mobile devices." They expect such chips to be available in about 5 to 10 years, according to the report, which CNET confirmed with Intel for its legitimacy.
Today, smartphone and tablet chips typically top out at four cores (or five, if you count Nvidia's mini Tegra core). Intel's Atom chip, meanwhile, currently only has a single core.

But adding additional cores, Intel says, would allow a device to distribute tasks among the different parts of the chip, making the processor faster and more power-efficient.
For example, one core could encrypt an e-mail while another could run an app, an Intel researcher told Computerworld. Or some cores could run at higher speeds for better performance while others perform basic tasks at lower clock speeds to preserve battery life.

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Intel to try out wireless charging technology in ultrabooks and smartphones in 2013

Intel may adopt its self-developed wireless charging technology into Intel-based ultrabooks and smartphones in the second half of 2013, according to sources from the upstream supply chain.

In addition to Intel, there are already several smartphone players and telecom carriers aggressively developing wireless charging technology. Japan-based NTT Docomo and Sharp both previously launched smartphones with wireless charging functions that meet the Wireless Power Consortium's (WPS) Qi standard, but high prices are still creating barriers that distance consumers, the sources noted.

Samsung was originally expected to launch a resonance wireless smartphone charger in June, but the project was delayed to the end of 2012 or into 2013 as performance still needs some improvements. Some market watchers expect Samsung will launch a magnetic induction wireless charger to fill the spot first.

Intel's wireless charging solution uses an ultrabook as the power source paired with related software and a transmitter to wirelessly charge a smartphone. According to Intel's data, the solution will feature lower power consumption and does not require the phone to be put in a very specific position.

Intel also provides design suggestions to integrate the transmitter and receiver together to lower production costs, and Intel has also designed software exclusively for power charging with functions such as power charging equipment examination, smartphone charging control, and equipment position tests all included.

Sources from notebook players also pointed out that Intel's Haswell platform is unlikely to fully adopt the wireless charging technology and the idea is expected be seen in just a few models in the second half of 2013.

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Intel's new smartphone app lets you know if your car is being tampered with

Image via CrunchBase Carjacking and automobile theft may not be the kind of crimes most users have to deal with on a daily basis, but there will always be users who feel that more automobile security can only be a good thing, especially if one takes into account how vital a role the car plays in serving a person's transportation needs today. And leave it to Intel to deliver the added security any anxious car owner craves with its new work-in-progress app which is reportedly capable of sending alerts directly to a user's smartphone upon any detection of attempted tampering made by unauthorized personnel.


As Intel's new app is still currently a work-in-progress, not much detail about the app is available. However, what we do know is that Intel plans to pull off such a solution by "connecting the electronics inside a car to the Internet, so that mobile apps can provide a car owner with updates on his vehicle when the two are apart". To achieve this, Intel has reportedly installed a custom circuit board that has been outfitted with its Atom processors into a car, which then "interfaces with the car's electronics, and connects the car to a cloud server over a mobile network".


That just leaves Intel with the issue on how to get the information gathered by the car's electronics into a user's mobile phone. According to a report published by Technology Review, the chip giant has built special apps for phones powered by both the Android and iOS operating systems in order to give them access to the car's log data, as well as send commands remotely over to their vehicle. The report goes on to claim that the apps can be used to carry out a variety of both simple and complex tasks, such as remotely opening the car doors and starting the engine, or even sending security alerts and streaming live feeds should the car's proximity and motion sensors detect any irregularity.


Sounds great? Well, it would appear that Intel's novel solution comes with one major drawback; this continuous flow of data to and from the car and a user's smartphone is carried out almost exclusively through WiFi connectivity, and not 3G. This has raised some concerns that a technologically-savvy carjacker might be able to circumvent such a security feature by either relocating the car quickly enough to a WiFi dead zone, or simply coming equipped with tools to jam the WiFi signals, thus preventing any data from being sent to a user's smartphone.


Then again, we have pointed out earlier that Intel's new solution is still currently under development, and the finalized version (should there ever be one) will probably boast the addition of various built-in security mechanisms that may be specially designed to prevent the disruption of such wireless signals from all but the most determined carjacker. Well, we shall see.

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