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Japan Takes 1st Place On Supercomputer List
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A Japanese computer has earned the number one spot on the Top 500 supercomputer list, ending China’s short reign of just six months. At 8.16 petaflops (quadrillion floating-point calculations per second), the K computer is more powerful than the next five systems combined.
The K computer’s performance was measured using 68,544 SPARC64 VIIIfx CPUs each with eight cores, for a total of 548,352 cores, almost twice as many as any other system on the Top500 list. The computer is still being put together, and when it enters service in November 2012 will have more than 80,000 SPARC64 VIIIfx CPUs according to its manufacturer, Fujitsu.
Japan’s ascension to the top means that the Chinese Tianhe-1A supercomputer, which took the number 1 position in November last year, is now in second spot with its 2.57 petaflops. But China continues to grow the number of systems it has on the list, up from 42 to 62 systems. The change at the top also means that Jaguar, built for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), is bumped down to third place.
More Citigroup Accounts Compromised Than Stated
June 21, 2011 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
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Citigroup was apparently hit harder by a cyber-attack in May than what was originally reported; which is now 360,000 of its customers. Unfortunately, this number is double the number that Citigroup initially stated.
Citigroup is one of the biggest banks in the US and ranks number 3 overall. The breach occurred on May 10th and was confirmed by Citigroup on June 8thth. That said, around 360,080 North American Citigroup credit card accounts were impacted by the breach, Citigroup stated; which is around 1 per cent of their North American card customer’s base.
TSMC May Beat Intel To Market With 3D Chip
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Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. is competing with Intel to become the first technology firm to offer three-dimensional chips that boost the density of transistors in a single semiconductor by up to 1000 times.
TSMC, the world’s largest contract chip maker, could make its first 3D chips commercially available before the end of 2011, according to a person close to the situation who wishes to remain anonymous.
The time frame for TSMC matches the end of 2011 schedule that Intel has set for the launch of its 3D Tri-Gate chips, which the company expects to be the world’s first commercial 3D chip and the most significant advance in chip technology since the development of the chip transistor in the 1950s.
With several layers of silicon stacked together, a 3D chip can achieve performance gains of about a third while consuming 50% less power. For this reason, 3D chips are particularly well suited to power new generations of mobile devices such as tablets and mobile phones, businesses where Intel has so far failed to establish a significant presence.
“This is definitely a new business opportunity for TSMC,” said Shang-Yi Chiang, senior vice president for R&D at TSMC, in an interview. “We are building a patent portfolio now.”
3D chips are expected to solve a number of problems for chipmakers who are aiming for performance increases in ever-smaller chips. As transistor density rises, the wires connecting them have become both thinner and closer together, resulting in increased resistance and overheating. These problems cause signal delays, limiting the clock speed of central processing units.
“3D chips look more attractive because of their greater density,” Chiang said. “However, it is more difficult to make them because of the testing issues. If you have five stacked dies and one of the dies is bad, you have to scrap the whole thing.”
Chinese Government Questioned About Cyber-attack
June 18, 2011 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
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The U.S. State Department questioned the Chinese government regarding an attack that had temporarily shut down the website Change.org after the site hosted a petition urging Chinese authorities to release artist Ai Weiwei from custody.
U.S. deputy assistant secretary Daniel Baer raised concerns about the attack in April with China’s foreign ministry, according to an official letter sent from the State Department to U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.). Change.org obtained a copy of the letter and released it Tuesday.
The nature of those talks is still somewhat vague. The U.S. Embassy in Beijing said it had no current information on the matter and deferred to the State Department. China’s foreign ministry has yet to respond to a request for comment.
Change.org, an online petitioning platform, was the victim of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack originating from China on April 17. The attacks nearly brought down the site for days.
DDoS attacks can do this by using hundreds or thousands of hacked computers to drive traffic to a website. The data will become so overwhelming that the site will become inaccessible to users.
Change.org said the DDoS attacks from China continue to bring down the site intermittently. The FBI is investigating the case, said Benjamin Joffe-Walt, an editor with Change.org.
Acer Is The Latest Victim Of Computer Hacking
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Taiwanese PC manufacturer Acer is investigating a cyber hacker attack that stole customer data from its Packard Bell division in Europe, the company said.
Acer said the security breach was limited to customers’ names, addresses, phone numbers, emails, and system serial numbers. No credit card data was stolen, it said. Acer provided no other details about the breach, and said the investigation was ongoing.
News of the breach was reported several days ago, after a hacker group called Pakistan Cyber Army claimed to have stolen the personal data of about 40,000 people from an Acer server in Europe. Acer did not comment on the attack at the time.
The Hacker News had published screen shots of the personal data and some of the source code that was stolen in the security breach. It also said that the Pakistan Cyber Army would issue a press release detailing more about their motives. But so far, no new information has surfaced from the hacking group.
Acer Launches Sandy Bridge Notebooks
Acer updated its Timeline notebook series with Intel’s Sandy Bridge family of CPUs. The Timeline X series will come in three sizes, 13.3-inch, 14-inch and 15.6-inch and they are about an inch thick. Furthermore, the notebooks will be equipped with Acer’s PowerSmart Technology that is supposed to provide battery life of up to nine hours on models with integrated graphics and up to eight hours for those models with discrete graphics.
RSA To Replace SecureID Tokens
June 10, 2011 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
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In an acknowledgement of the severity of its recent systems breach, RSA Security said Monday that it will replace SecureID tokens for any customer that asks.
Customers have been left to ponder whether or not to trust RSA’s security tokens since March, when the company confirmed that it had been hacked and issued a vague warning to its customers. Then, two weeks ago, government contractor Lockheed Martin was reportedly forced to pull access to its virtual private network after hackers compromised the SecureID technology.
In a letter sent to customers Monday, RSA confirmed that the Lockheed Martin incident was related to SecureID. Information “taken from RSA in March had been used as an element of an attempted broader attack on Lockheed Martin,” RSA Executive Chairman Art Coviello stated in the letter.
Coviello said the company remains “highly confident in the RSA SecureID product,” but acknowledged that the recent Lockheed Martin attack and general concerns over hacking, “may reduce some customers’ overall risk tolerance.”
Jobs Returns To Announce Apple’s New Product
June 8, 2011 by admin
Filed under Consumer Electronics
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Apple Inc CEO Steve Jobs returns on Monday to the stage at San Francisco’s Moscone center to unveil what investors hope will be the next source of growth for the world’s most valuable technology company.
Jobs, who has been on medical leave for several months and last took the stage in March to present the iPad 2, will announce the iCloud, a Web-based service that lets consumers stream music they bought to any Apple device, pitting it against rivals Google Inc and Amazon.com Inc.
That expansion into cloud computing is seen as necessary if the company is to stay competitive with increasingly popular open-sourced software, such as Google’s Android operating system, according to analysts and investors.
The iCloud has the potential to make Apple’s iTunes even more powerful, making it tougher for rivals to keep up, Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu said.
“It looks like Apple will likely offer some base service for free,” Wu said. “Competitors, including RIM, Google, Amazon and Microsoft already have a hard time competing with iTunes as it is, but we believe will likely find it even tougher with iCloud enhancements.”
AMD’s Bulldozer Will Be Late
AMD has confirmed that their Bulldozer chip-set will be delayed until later in the summer.
The FX Series which is codenamed Zambezi is based on the Bulldozer architecture. Unfortunately, AMD didn’t provide an official date they just said that the FX Series is coming in “late summer”, which means do not expect to the chip until probably late August.
Cell Phones Can Be Dangerous
June 5, 2011 by admin
Filed under Smartphones
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It appears that an Australian brain surgeon has called the latest report in reference to the report on the potential harmful effects of mobile phones as a wake-up call to users and the telecommunications industry.
Dr Teo, said he was “pleased” that at last there came conclusive proof that mobile phones caused brain tumours. He also went on to say that the report should serve as a ”wake up call’ that should alert both the public and the mobile phone industry to the link between mobile use and cancer.”
As you know a report was released by the World Health Organisation’s cancer research wing that said radio frequency electromagnetic fields generated by cell phones are “possibly carcinogenic to humans” and heavy usage could lead to a possible increased risk of glioma, a malignant type of brain cancer.