afay - Slashdot User

Submission + - Interactive Ray Tracer on Playstation 3 (youtube.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 09, 2007 @11:39AM

An anonymous reader writes: Interactive Ray Tracer for Cell Broadband Engine demonstrates the power of the Cell Broadband Engine for interactively ray tracing high-definition television (HDTV) images of complex scenes. It can trace high-definition frames in fractions of a second, instead of the hours it takes production studios today. Interactive Ray Tracer can run on both the Playstation 3 and QS20 Cell Broadband Engine-based platforms. This short video shows how Playstation 3's are used to produce fully interactive Ray Tracing.

Submission + - Human diversity on the decline

Submitted by

jd

on Tuesday August 07, 2007 @11:31PM

jd writes: "In a study covering five different periods of history, from 300 AD to the present day, and geographically spread across much of Europe, scientists have extracted the mitochondrial DNA from a sizable number of individuals in an effort to examine changes in diversity. The results, published in the Royal Society journal is intriguing to say the least. 1700 years ago, three out of every four individuals belonged to a different haplotype. In modern Europe, the number is only one in three. The researchers blame a combination of plague, selection of dominant lineages and culturally-inflicted distortions. The researchers say more work needs to be done, but are unclear if this involves archaeology or experiments involving skewing the data in the local female population."

Submission + - Intel release threading library under GPL 2

Submitted by littlefoo on Wednesday July 25, 2007 @06:16AM

littlefoo writes: Intel Software Dispatch have announced the availability of the Threading Building Blocks (TBB) template library under the GPL v2 with the run-time exception — so this previously commerical only package is now open for all the use, whether for open-source projects or commerical offerings (although they are explicitly encouraging open source use). The interface is more task-based then thread-based, but with a somewhat different view of things than, e.g. OpenMP. From the Intel release

"Intel® Threading Building Blocks (TBB) offers a rich and complete approach to expressing parallelism in a C++ program. It is a library that helps you leverage multi-core processor performance without having to be a threading expert. Threading Building Blocks is not just a threads-replacement library. It represents a higher-level, task-based parallelism that abstracts platform details and threading mechanism for performance and scalability."

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