Wednesday November 15, 2006

Wouldn't it be nice if our mobile devices could all be recharged wirelessly? Researchers at MIT are revisiting some of Nikola Tesla's thinking about wireless power. Read about it here.

The sobering graphic below was presented this morning by Lloyd Dickman from QLogic at an InfiniBand session here at Supercomputing '06 in Tampa.

The link-level bit error rate (BER) allowed by the InfiniBand standard results in some alarming overall error rates when the number of links is scaled to the level required to build large clusters using current approaches. Clearly there is value in any efforts to reduce the BER or to reduce the number of links required to build large clusters. Of course, software must ultimately be resilient to these failures, but keeping the underlying hardware error rate at manageable levels will allow applications to make forward progress at reasonable and useful rates.

Supercomputing '06 here in Tampa includes a very large vendor exhibition with hundreds of companies, universities, research laboratories, etc. participating. As I finished a tour of the show floor yesterday and was walking towards the Sun booth, I was struck by how different it was from any other booth at the show.

It wasn't the content: We have as much flashy gear and as many demo stations as any other large vendor in our 50' x 50' booth. It wasn't the activity level: I think we have a rather high number of visitors given our excellent location near the main entrance to the hall, and given also the number of interesting new products we're displaying (e.g., Thumper, Sun Fire 8000.) But that wasn't what I'd noticed.

It took me a few minutes to realize it was our branding program I was reacting to. In that mass of hard-edged, high-tech focused graphics, our earth-toned imaging with naturalistic themes was a little island of warmth in a big, cold sea of uninspiring and unremarkable messaging. Green trees, a red surfboard, children. It made the booth a warmer and more welcoming place to visit.