Benton RSS Feed

With the aid of the Chinese military, Intel has won itself big bragging rights: the world’s fastest supercomputer runs entirely on Intel semiconductors. It is the first time in 15 years, Intel says, that an all-Intel machine has held top honors. More important is what this news says about computing: the kind of work done by supercomputers is increasingly applicable to the kind of work done by business. Intel doesn’t want to sell its biggest computers to researchers and the world’s armies; it wants to sell them to companies like Amazon for its Amazon Web Services. Intel believes that many ordinary businesses, possibly even consumers, will soon be accessing what were once the most expensive and rarefied computers.

The new computer, called a Tianhe-2, or Milkyway-2, was built at the National University of Defense Technology in Changsha, China. At its peak, it can perform at a speed of nearly 55 petaflops – with a petaflop akin to one thousand trillion instructions per second. The previous record-holder, announced last November, had a peak performance of 27.1 petaflops. Five years ago, a single petaflop machine was record-breaking. In addition to the usual supercomputing tasks like weather analysis or geophysical research, makers of the new supercomputer also listed its capabilities for Big Data analysis. The Tianhe-2 can process 600 terabytes of data on just 1,024 of its 16,000 computing nodes.

Verizon Communications is looking at a move into Canada’s cellular telephone business, one of several possible new entrants whose arrival would salvage the federal government’s ambitions for a fourth wireless player across the country.

Ottawa, which is weighing alternatives as it seeks to preserve its plan for enhanced wireless competition, views Verizon as the most likely foreign option. Verizon has held exploratory talks with investors in Wind Mobile – one of two struggling new entrants in the wireless market – in recent weeks, but those discussions are still at an early stage. AT&T Corp. of the U.S., Vodafone Group Plc of Britain and Telenor Group of Norway are other names circulating within the telecommunications industry as possible investors, sources said.

Tech giants like Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple were quick to deny that they give U.S. intelligence authorities broad access to their user data after being accused of doing so via leaked details of a National Security Agency program called PRISM. Edward Snowden, the man who leaked the PRISM documents and much more, called those initial tech denials “misleading.” But he said the leaks were having his desired effect, saying, “We’re finally beginning to see more transparency and better details about these programs for the first time since their inception.” Snowden added that Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Apple could have used their heft to blow the whistle themselves.

[Commentary] Rep Peter King (R-NY) sparked a firestorm with his suggestion that Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian reporter who exposed the National Security Agency’s terrorist surveillance activities, ought to be arrested before he can publish more US secrets. Greenwald responded that Rep King wanted to prosecute him for “the crime of doing journalism.” Wrong. Greenwald’s crime is violating 18 USC § 798, which makes it a criminal act to publish classified information revealing government cryptography or communications intelligence. The law specifically states that publishing, not just divulging, such information is a federal crime.