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Submission Summary: 0 pending, 2 declined, 2 accepted (4 total, 50.00% accepted)

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Submission + - Massively Parallel Computer Built From Single Laye (technologyreview.com)

djeps writes: Japanese scientists have built a cellular automaton from individual molecules that carries out huge numbers of calculations in parallel

Modern computer chips handle data at the mind-blowing rate of some 10^13 bits per second. Neurons, by comparison, fire at a rate of around 100 times per second or so. And yet the brain outperforms the best computers in numerous tasks.

One reason for this is way computations take place. In computers, calculations occur in strict pipelines, one at a time.

In the brain, however, many calculations take place at once. Each neuron communicates with up to 1000 other neurons at any one time. And since the brain consists of billions neurons, the potential for parallel calculating is clearly huge.

Network

Submission + - Searching for balloons in a social network (mit.edu)

djeps writes: The Red Balloon Challenge, sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the U.S. Department of Defense, laid out a simple objective: Use social media to identify the GPS coordinates for all 10 balloons, suspended at fixed locations across the country. The first team to do so would win $40,000. The challenge, commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Internet, highlighted social networking’s potential to solve widely distributed, time-sensitive problems.
Facebook

Submission + - Making Facebook Self Healing (facebook.com)

djeps writes: I've used to achieve this with Nagios Event Handlers scripts and RabbitMQ. But facebook has done it for a far larger scale than my old days of sysadmin: When your infrastructure is the size of Facebook’s, there are always broken servers and pieces of software that have gone down or are generally misbehaving. In most cases, our systems are engineered such that these issues cause little or no impact to people using the site. But sometimes small outages can become bigger outages, causing errors or poor performance on the site. If a piece of broken software or hardware does impact the site, then it's important that we fix it or replace it as quickly as possible. Even if it's not causing issues for users yet, it could in the future so we need to take care of it quickly.

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