US funds tech giants’ efforts to build next-gen supercomputers

The US government is giving six companies a total of $258 million in hopes that they can build an exascale supercomputer before China, Japan or anyone else does. A post on the Exascale Computing Project website has revealed that the Department of Energy has awarded AMD, Cray, HP, IBM, Intel and Nvidia $258 million in funding over a three-year period. The six corporations won’t depend solely on the government’s money, though — to show that they’re also fully invested in the project, they’ll cover 40 percent of the total costs that could amount to least $430 million.

An exascale supercomputer would be capable of making a billion billion calculations per second and is expected to have the same processing power as the human brain at neural level. It could change the way we do research, help us conjure up elusive treatments for illnesses and unravel the mysteries of our planet and the universe.

According to the Exascale Computing Project, DOE’s funding will help support hardware, software and application development. In HP’s case, for instance, the agency wants it to create an exascale computer based on “The Machine” — its memory-driven supercomputer that has the potential to replace data server farms with a single computer the size of a fridge.

The project aims to conjure up at least one exascale-capable system by 2021, though the companies involved might have to work faster than that to beat China, which vows to have a functional exascale machine by 2020. Seeing as it successfully built what’s currently known as the world’s fastest supercomputer, the Asian country could very well succeed.

Via: The Verge

Source: Exascale Computing Project

Free App of the Week: Infinite Jumper Game ‘Beat Stomper’

Apple has made electronic music-driven infinite jumper game Beat Stomper its Free App of the Week on the App Store. Usually $2, this trippy little game has been rated at least four stars by over 650 gamers for its frenetic jump-and-hold mechanic, combined with a rousing soundtrack which adapts to the action unfolding on the screen.

Neon-drenched graphics and rapidly strobing particle effects are par for the course in this vertical high score chaser. Gamers control a little square that jumps high into the air with a tap on the screen. Another tap forces the square to stomp down, hopefully onto the next platform. With platforms moving from side to side, timing is everything. Not only that, the movement of the platform also impacts the direction you jump in. This from the App Store editors’ notes:

Absolutely exploding with style and energy, this infinite jumper challenges you to guide little leaping block people up, up and away into musical heaven. Using taps to hurl your angular avatars from one shifting platform to the next, you’ll aim for boosts that’ll rocket them even higher – or at least keep them from plunging to their game-ending doom.

Beat Stomper requires 136MB on iPhone and iPad, and can be downloaded for free on the App Store. [Direct Link]

Tag: App of the Week
Discuss this article in our forums

DirecTV Now tempts potential subscribers with free Roku box

AT&T’s DirectTV Now over-the-top streaming television service came on strong last fall. Launched against heavy competition from Sling TV and PlayStation Vue, AT&T decided to sweeten the deal for subscribers by giving away a free Apple TV, a year of HBO and a temporarily reduced introductory fee. Variety reports that the telecom giant is now giving customers a free Roku Premiere set-top box when they prepay for two months of DirecTV Now.

It’s hard not to see this as another hedge against a flagging subscriber base, of course. While AT&T bragged about adding more than 200,000 video subscribers for the initial DirecTV Now launch, it hasn’t done too well since. According to Bloomberg sources, DirecTV lost around 3,000 customers in February and didn’t gain any new ones in March, either. These kinds of offers happen all the time, however, and don’t necessarily point to a floundering customer base, per se.

DirecTV Now only became available on Roku devices this past May, according to Variety, and can also be viewed with Apple TV, Amazon’s Fire TV, Google Chromecast and various iOS and Android mobile devices. The service is priced from a basic $35 per month with 60 channels to a “Gotta Have It” option with more than 120 channels for $70 per month.

Via: Variety

Source: DirecTV Now

Woman raped in India sues Uber for obtaining her medical records

The Uber passenger who was brutally raped by her driver in India in 2014 has sued the ride-hailing firm for improperly obtaining and sharing her medical records. See, while the company showed support for her plight and publicly declared that it will do “everything to help bring [the] perpetrator to justice” — the accused, pictured above, was sentenced to life in prison — its head honchos apparently doubted her story. The lawsuit is partly based on a report published by Recode and The New York Times in early June, which revealed that Uber executive Eric Alexander got her records from the doctors who examined her after the sexual assault.

It’s unclear if he obtained those records legally — either way, he shared them with company chief Travis Kalanick and fellow exec Emil Michael. Both Alexander and Michael were recently fired. Kalanick, on the other hand, is currently on a leave of absence while the company is undergoing a work culture overhaul after being accused of fostering a toxic, sexist environment. The three executives reportedly speculated that she conspired with Uber’s top rival in India, Ola, to stage the incident and sabotage the ride-hailing service.

In the documents the plaintiff’s lawyers submitted to court, they wrote:

“Kalanick, Eric Alexander, Uber’s then-Vice President for Business in Asia and Emil Michael, Uber’s then-Senior Vice President for Business, bought into the narrative of rape denialism which focuses on whether a victim had been drinking, what she was wearing, or whether she knew the alleged rapist, rather than on the very real physical, emotional and financial toll that rape takes on a victim.

By focusing on “whether she was really raped at all,” and painting Plaintiff as an opportunist and a liar, Defendants seemed to be assuring themselves that the only reason why a woman would report a sexual assault is for personal gain, rather than to prevent similar crimes from occurring again or to right an injustice.

Plaintiff is devastated by the acts of Uber and its executives, who have intruded into her very personal medical records from her sexual assault and callously disregarded her privacy by sharing their contents across the Company.”

The documents also say that the plaintiff has filed the lawsuit for intrusion into private affairs, for public disclosure of private facts and for defaming her character. As for Uber, a spokesperson said in a statement when asked for a comment about the lawsuit:

“No one should have to go through a horrific experience like this, and we’re truly sorry that she’s had to relive it over the last few weeks.”

Source: Reuters, Ars Technica

AMD’s Vega Frontier Edition cards now have prices, and they’re not cheap

Why it matters to you

You’re going to really need some serious computational power to justify the investment in AMD’s Radeon Vega Frontier Edition GPUs.

With Intel’s Core X-Series and AMD’s Ryzen, the competition in high-end desktop CPUs is starting to solidify. When it comes to GPUs, Nvidia’s GeForce GTX offerings are currently at the top of the heap, and gamers are awaiting AMD’s next generation Vega GPUs to arrive to complete the competition in graphics as well.

So far, we’re lacking details on Vega, having only seen information on the Frontier Edition cards that are intended primarily for churning through highly technical workloads like machine learning, 3D rendering, and cloud computing. The Radeon Vega Frontier Edition cards aren’t aimed at the typical gamer, which is a good thing if some recently surfaced pricing information is valid, as VideoCardz reports.

The pricing appeared at two sites, Scan UK and Sabre PC, and the Frontier Edition cards won’t be cheap. According to the sites, the air-cooled version will be priced at $1,199 while the liquid-cooled model will come in at a hefty $1,799. For that money, Vega Frontier cards promise up to 13 TFlops of power, which is a TFlop faster than Nvidia’s fastest GeForce GTX Titan Xp.

These cards won’t be snatched up by gamers, but rather will be used by organizations building out computing clusters and who need serious power for artificial applications, 3D rendering, and other demanding computational tasks. AMD provided some benchmarks during its introduction of the new cards showing them to be 70 percent faster than Nvidia’s Titan Xp card in Solidworks, a 3D computer-aided drafting (CAD) applications.

Nevertheless, AMD is claiming that its Vega GPUs for gamers will be even faster. Without any additional details, though, that claim remains unverified. These cards won’t show up until later in 2017, and so AMD has time to perfect the GPUs and bring down pricing to more affordable levels. When Vega does arrive, Nvidia will face the same kind of competitive pressure that Intel is facing from AMD’s Ryzen CPUs — and that’s good new for everyone who plans to be in the market soon for a new PC.

Luxury apartments on wheels may keep you from ever going home

Why it matters to you

If hotel amenities don’t measure up, you can travel with your own luxury suite.

If rolling luxury is the only way you’ll travel on the ground, high-end motor homes are the answer — as long as you can write a big check. Prevost is a premier brand associated with luxury motor homes, but you won’t find one on RVTrader that isn’t associated with another brand name. The posh motor home we’re looking at, for example, is the Prevost-based Emerald Luxury Coach No. 5389.

Here’s the deal with Prevost, which is a division of Volvo Bus Company. Prevost builds and sells upscale motor coaches, but not finished motor homes. Prevost builds motor home coaches including the power train and all the mechanical work from the chassis up. A select list of converters then finishes the interior and amenities. Emerald Luxury Coaches is one of five motor home converters currently recommended on the Prevost website.

You can buy new Prevost Emerald Luxury Coaches already finished, such as No. 5389. However, if you want to create a custom rig, here’s how Prevost describes it, “The process of creating a motor home to ideally suit your needs and desires begins with a collaboration involving you, Prevost and our converter partner that you choose.

“We work with our converters to ensure that the structure and the floor plan that we build will fit not only with your needs but also theirs in terms of conversion procedures and content. This support and service, provided while making your motor home perfect for you, is just the beginning of our long-term association with you, the Prevost owner.”

Sounds pretty sweet, right? When the checkbook comes out, however, leave a lot of space on the amount lines. Prices for brand new Prevost-based motor homes vary by the converter and the finishing and amenities you choose. Figure somewhere in the ballpark of $1.5 to $2.5 million and you’ll have a lot of leeway in your choices. While we don’t know the exact pricing structure, it’s conceivable you can go quite a bit north of the higher number, but you have to draw the line somewhere.

Prevost has two 45-foot long motor home coaches. The H3-45 VIP is the taller of the two, at 149 inches and its 497 cubic feet of underfloor storage space is larger. The X3-45 VIP, the coach the Emerald No. 5389 is built on, has more interior headroom but at 141 inches, less overall height, which can help with handling and getting into low-clearance spots. The X3-45 VIP also has a longer wheelbase. There’s not as much underside storage space (433 square feet) with the X3-45 VIP, but it has a wider 30-inch entrance door and fewer and lower steps, which makes it easier to get in and out.

In each case, the standard Prevost coaches have loads of standard equipment with an equally long list of options, including up to four factory slide-outs to increase the coach’s interior width. As you can see from the images, the Emerald Luxury Coach No. 5389 is set up for sleeping two people with plenty of space for entertaining. If you’re building from scratch within the 45-foot standard length, there are plenty of ways to adapt the coach for sleeping more people. Top entertainers on the road often set up Prevost-based motor homes to handle several of their group.

Whether you’re an actual rock star or a success in some other lifestyle, if you’re thinking about riding and staying in your own luxurious digs while you move around the country, this is the way to go.

China bounced an ‘unhackable’ quantum signal between cities

The field of quantum cryptography, which seeks to transmit encrypted information using entangled quantum particles like photons, could help lay the groundwork for tomorrow’s quantum networks but it faces a significant physical hurdle: entangled photons are crazy hard to transmit long distances. Even in fiber optic cables, they can only go about 150 miles before completely degrading. But a team of researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences may have the solution. You just have to send the photons 745 miles into space.

Though the idea of using satellite relays to shunt entangled photons into space and back has long been considered, it wasn’t until last August that the nation sent up its first such orbiter, the $100 million Quantum Experiments at Space Scale. It is reportedly equipped with a laser-and-mirror system as well as a special crystal that can encode data and encryption keys onto photons as they travel back to Earth.

Even without the ground-based obstacles that conventional quantum networks and experiments have to contend with, spotting these photons on their way back from orbit is no easy feat. The crystal can generate as many as 6 million pairs of photons at any given time however the two designated ground stations, which are located 750 miles apart, are only able to detect around one par per second. “It’s a challenging task,” physicist Chao-Yang Lu, told Wired. “It’s like you have to clearly see a human hair from 300 meters away.”

Lu and his team hope that this successful experiment, which has recently been published in the Journal Science (paywall), could pave the way for more secure encryption systems. In theory, you’d first encode an encryption key based on the characteristics of a photon stream and send that to your message’s recipient. You’d then encrypt your message with that key and send it on as well.

If someone tries to intercept, decode or even observe the key while in transit, the laws of quantum mechanics dictate that the key itself would change. So even if they intercepted the key and the message, both would be useless. The current state of the technology isn’t quite sensitive enough to do that yet but that’s essentially the goal.

Via: Wired

Source: Science (paywall)

‘Super Mario Odyssey’ lets player two tag along as Mario’s hat

Just like at last year’s E3, a new installment in a Nintendo franchise is stealing the show. Super Mario Odyssey already plays like a weird, wonderful new game with an expansive world to explore. But you won’t have to go it alone: the new game will let another player take control of Mario’s eyeball-lined sentient hat, Cappy.

In a demonstration, the game’s developer Kenta Motokura showed off what the second player can do with Cappy…which isn’t much more than flying around hitting enemies. That’s pretty much what other players got to do when tagging along in Super Mario Galaxy, which Nintendo released for the Wii a decade ago. At the 6-minute mark in the video above, Nintendo’s Samantha Robertson hints at another combo move they’ll unveil sometime in the future, but it seems the second-player role in Odyssey is a lot like that in Galaxy: a fun, relaxed experience for younger or more casual friends to tag along with the main player. The game launches for the Switch on October 27th.

Source: Nintendo (YouTube)

Musical.ly debuts original mini-shows from NBC and MTV

Musical.ly debuts its first original shows today — the first of a few it will be rolling out over the coming weeks. The company has signed original content deals with entertainment groups Viacom, NBCUniversal and Hearst Magazines.

It was rumored last month that the music video app might be offering this sort of content soon, something that Snapchat has been doing for a while. As of now, the media groups won’t be making any money off of the shows, but Musical.ly plans to start generating programming revenue later on.

Setting itself apart from Snapchat is the user engagement Musical.ly has built into their content. Each episode of every show will link to a hashtag page filled with user-generated reaction videos.

The two shows that launched today are a shorter version of MTV’s “Nick Cannon’s Wild ‘N Out” and a how-to show called “Fashion to DIY For” that will help Musical.ly users put together runway looks. On Saturday, two more shows will hit the app — another MTV series called “Greatest Party Story Ever” and Hearst’s “Seventeen and the City,” which will feature things for young people to do in NYC. NBCUniversal will premiere a show about social media stars’ celebrity crushes in the coming weeks and plans to produce series from Telemundo in the future.

As of last December, Musical.ly claimed to have 40 million active users. So, these new shows will have quite an audience. Each show will be 2-4 minutes long and will be listed in a trending section for 24 hours.

Via: The Verge

Source: Variety

The new Microsoft Modern keyboard lets you forget your password

Why it matters to you

Do you tend to forget your computer login password? Microsoft’s modern keyboard has you covered.

Along with its newest Surface devices, the Surface Pro, and Surface Laptop, Microsoft added a number of new Surface-branded accessories that either stand alone or work with specific models. Now, there is another new Microsoft accessory to add to your list of options, although it drops the Surface brand name.

Specifically, Microsoft announced another Bluetooth keyboard that will work with any machine, not just a Surface device. But the Microsoft Modern Keyboard also adds in a convenient way to access Windows 10’s Hello password-less login technology, MSPoweruser reports.

The Microsoft Modern Keyboard is similar to the existing Surface Keyboard, which means it offers a sleek design with chicklet-style keys, isolated and dedicated arrow keys, and a numeric keyboard for anyone who needs to enter copious amounts of data. It utilizes Bluetooth 4.0 for connectivity and will work with a host of systems including Windows 8.1 through 10, Windows 10 phone, MacOS 10.10.5 and later, Android 4.4.2 and later, and iOS 8.1 and later.

The Modern Keyboard adds in a fingerprint scanner on a dedicated key that ties in with Windows Hello. That means you can simply tap that key with your registered finger and log into Windows 10 without needing to remember your password. In addition, if you’re using any apps that work with Windows Hello, then you can log into them and approve purchases using just your finger as well.

The newest Microsoft keyboard joins a number of specifically Surface-branded input devices that share a similar appearance. The Surface Ergonomic Keyboard, $130, offers a curved design that promises less fatigue along with Alcantara fabric for a more comfortable palm rest. The Surface Mouse is available for $50 and offers a metal scroll wheel in a sleek and simple design and, as MSPoweruser notes, will soon be rebranded as the Modern Mouse to match the new keyboard.

The Microsoft Modern Keyboard will be available soon from the Microsoft Store and other retail outlets for $130.