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Comment Re:More than just graphics (Score 1) 175

If you have a compatible nVidia graphics card (anything within the last 3 years), you should look into CUDA (http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_get.html). It's got a steep learning curve at first, but it's quite awesome. OpenCL is another option designed to be more cross-platform. Either way, you basically write some code in C (well...C with a few extensions and limitations) and it executes in parallel on the GPU. The current batch of nVidia GPUs support floats with both single precision and double precision, although there is a significant performance penalty with double precision for most applications. With the announcement nVidia made today, though, there will soon be new cards with much less of a performance penalty for double precision.

Comment Re:Why not the PS3? (Score 2, Informative) 101

This type of simulation can be and is being done using CUDA. In fact a talk is being given at the upcoming nVidia technology conference on this very subject. nVidia's website won't let me create a direct link, but if you click here and then Session Catalog > Session ID 1036, you can read the abstract.

Comment Re:Outsource it (Score 1) 205

The old design, even if we could build it, does not meet current safety standards. I've heard it said that, if they knew just how narrow the flight window was for Saturn V, they would not have flown it. I don't believe that's true; but, the mere fact that someone did make that statement, is indicative of how things have changed.
Networking

New Algorithm Boosts Network Efficiency 114

palegray.net writes "Researchers at the University of California have developed a new network routing algorithm that has the potential to significantly boost Internet traffic routing efficiency. This new approach focuses on the needs of dynamic networks, where connections are frequently transient. From the article: 'What the team did with their new routing algorithm, according to Savage's student Kirill Levchenko, was to reduce the "communication overhead" of route computation — by an order of magnitude.' For the technically inclined, the full research publication (PDF) is available."
Math

Submission + - Rubik's cube proof cut to 25 moves (arxivblog.com)

KentuckyFC writes: "A scrambled Rubik's cube can be solved in just 25 moves, regardless of the starting configuration. Tomas Rosicki, a Stanford-trained mathematician, has proven the new limit (down from 26 which was proved last year) using a neat piece of computer science. Rather than study individual moves, he's used the symmetry of the cube to study its transformations in sets. This allows him to separate the "cube space" into 2 billion sets each containing 20 billion elements. He then shows that a large number of these sets are essentially equivalent to other sets and so can be ignored (abstract on the physics arxiv). Even then, to crunch through the remaining sets, he needed a workstation with 8GB of memory and around 1500 hours of time on a Q6600 CPU running at 1.6GHz. Next up, 24 moves."

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