blasiusmaximus - Slashdot User

Comment Re:Mod parent way up! (Score 1) 275

by blasiusmaximus on Tuesday July 24, 2007 @06:51PM (#19976743) Attached to: First "Real" Benchmark for PostgreSQL

Have you considered using the PostgreSQL COPY function? It is about an order of magnitude faster then INSERT. The only caveat is that even COPY needs to update INDEXes if you have any, so with many indexes, you will see a more modest improvement.

IBM's Blue Gene Runs Continuously At 1 Petaflop 231

Posted by Zonk on Tuesday June 26, 2007 @01:02PM from the all-i-can-think-is-the-games-you-could-play dept.

An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet is reporting on IBM's claim that the Blue Gene/P will continuously operate at more than 1 petaflop. It is actually capable of 3 quadrillion operations a second, or 3 petaflops. IBM claims that at 1 petaflop, Blue Gene/P is performing more operations than a 1.5-mile-high stack of laptops! 'Like the vast majority of other modern supercomputers, Blue Gene/P is composed of several racks of servers lashed together in clusters for large computing tasks, such as running programs that can graphically simulate worldwide weather patterns. Technologies designed for these computers trickle down into the mainstream while conventional technologies and components are used to cut the costs of building these systems. The chip inside Blue Gene/P consists of four PowerPC 450 cores running at 850MHz each. A 2x2 foot circuit board containing 32 of the Blue Gene/P chips can churn out 435 billion operations a second. Thirty two of these boards can be stuffed into a 6-foot-high rack.'"

The Failure of the $100 Laptop? 487

Posted by Zonk on Saturday November 18, 2006 @07:10AM from the one-laptop-per-oops-you-need-juice dept.

RobertinXinyang writes "MSN's MoneyCentral has an article on the possibility that the $100 laptop project fails to meet its goals, and the potential of the project to harm people in developing nations. The article goes on to liken the project to 'good-natured showboating', and cites the unreality of a family using the glow from the laptop's screen as the only source of light in their hut. Perhaps there are better things to do with our time and money in developing nations?" From the article: "The entire idea may be misguided and counterproductive. At least that's what Stanford journalism lecturer an Africa watcher G. Pascal Zachary thinks. The basic argument is that with $100 you could almost feed a village for a year, so why waste that sum on a laptop? What are they thinking? The fact that these people need electricity more than they need a laptop is only part of the problem. The real problem is lost mind share. The people are harmed because these sorts of schemes are sopping up mind-share time of the people who might be doing something actually useful."

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