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Tuesday, January 08, 2013

13.7: Cosmos And Culture

Check It Out: 'The Human Face Of Big Data'

Shwetak Patel (foreground), a MacArthur Fellow, recognized that every device in a home has a unique signature that can be used to track energy usage. The data collected by Patel's system showed that digital video recorders were responsible for 11 percent of this home's power use, just one example of The Human Face of Big Data.

January 8, 2013 As I venture into new fields (like thinking about physics and cities) I become more astonished at Big Data's capacity for revolutionizing the way human beings organize themselves for better or for worse.

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Tuesday, October 30, 2012

All Tech Considered

Why Is This Supercomputer So Superfast?

Cray employees put the finishing touches on Titan at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. The supercomputer may be the world's fastest. It's designed to do 20 petaflops — or 20,000 trillion calculations — each second. It consumes enough electricity to power a small city of 9,000 people.

October 30, 2012 Titan, potentially the world's fastest computer, comes online at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The supercomputer is designed to do more than 20,000 trillion calculations a second, allowing researchers to model everything from black holes to nuclear reactors. And they'll have video gamers to thank for its blazing speed.

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