I do lots of scientific computing (radio astronomy signal processing) on consumer-level NVIDIA cards and it is *all* FP32. These kinds of cards (and the 12GB of mem) could be very useful for my work, and others who do DSP-type of *scientific* computing.

Obviously something worth investigating, however, the temperatures for BA 38 were -70 C = -94 F, which is decidedly more chilly than the -58 F for the ariana flight.

Yet another /. meme? And not even a very funny one at that....

* back to lurking *

I've read slashdot daily since it started -- it has been a fantastic source of information, ideas, and laughs. Good luck with all your future endeavors.

Scott

All of the energy that we see (as well as the energy we don't see, which is the vast majority of it and which comes out in a relativistic particle wind) comes from the rotation of the neutron star. That means that pulsars are flywheels. And amazingly (even to me, and I study them daily), the most energetic pulsars give off tens of thousands of times more power than the total power output of the Sun. And all from rotation. That's crazy.

Damn the Universe is cool.

Actually, they aren't using the GBT's spectrometer. They are using an instrument that I helped to develop for pulsar research called GUPPI, which uses FPGAs and GPUs to real-time process 800MHz of radio bandwidth.

However, in this case they are using GUPPI's GPU nodes to record 800MHz of Nyquist-sampled band centered at 1.5GHz. Each sample is 2-bits, and with 2 polarizations, that is how they get 800MB/s (or almost a GB/s as it says in the article).

If you want some basic info about GUPPI, you can find it here:

https://safe.nrao.edu/wiki/bin/view/CICADA/NGNPP

You mean this data?

Mann 1998/9

On the other hand, if you meant every email Mann sent in the past 10 years, go jump in a lake. We don't even get president's personal correspondence and notes until after they die! Why should it be any different for scientists?

I think you may be asking for the impossible. Well maybe not. I think that your question needs more details. The following information would be useful:

• What you are mounting on the equatorial mount? Is it a telescope or a camera? How big of a telescope?
• What are you trying to photograph

If you are trying to photograph deep sky objects through a mid sized telescope, I don't think you will find a mount in your budget range, unless you can get one used off of ebay or some such. The tabletop equatorial mount might be appropriate if you're just doing the sky. However, for a telescope, just the motors for a good equatorial drive will set you back $100 or more....

If you are only trying to photograph planets or the moon, you won't need any tracking ability to get spectacular photographs.

Actually, Lithium is one of the least abundant elements in the universe, at least in terms of elements that don't decay radioactively. Quoth wikipedia:

Though very light in atomic weight, lithium is less common in the solar system than 25 of the first 32 chemical elements.

The lack of lithium in the universe is one of the great unsolved mysteries in astronomy.

I'm certainly one of them (thanked him for Cosmos in my PhD thesis specifically).

And I agree with you about Demon-Haunted World. I think that should be required reading for all high school students.

The good thing is that the pulsars which glitch are the young ones (hundreds to millions of years old). The pulsars that we are using for NANOGrav are millisecond pulsars which are hundreds of millions or billions of years old, have much smaller magnetic fields than young pulsars, and basically never glitch. They are extremely stable rotators -- much better than normal pulsars.

Oops, I wasn't looking carefully... the minimum cost for true bluewater broadband is $1500/month.....

Marine satellite broadband. It ain't cheap (cheapest plan is $400/month), but seeing how much they're spending on the rest of this boondoggle, it should be affordable for them....