Lifeboat Foundation

Recently, Microsoft Azure joined the Top 10 club of the TOP500 super computer rankings by delivering 30.05 Petaflops. It was based on Microsoft’s recently announced Azure NDm A100 80GB v4, available on demand. These Azure NDm A100 v4 instances are powered by NVIDIA GPU acceleration and NVIDIA InfiniBand networking.

Microsoft today highlighted the latest (December 2021) MLPerf 1.1 results in which Azure delivered the #2 performance overall and the #1 performance by a cloud provider.

This is a short videoclip I made of the CBS News Special program entitled “Forever Young_Searching for the Fountain of Youth” aired on Nov 29, 2021.

The entire program lasts 43 minutes and in this 2-minute videoclip I highlight the excerpts I found most relevant. In the description of the video is the link to see the entire program.

Continue reading “Forever Young — Searching for the Fountain of Youth | Clip of a CBS News Special” »

Quantum physics across dimensions: Unidirectional Kondo Scattering.

An Italian energy storage company, Energy Dome, has announced the close of its $11M Series A fundraise, with the goal of deploying the first commercially viable CO2 battery in a demonstration project in its native Sardinia, Italy. The proposed 100 megawatt-hours (MWh) CO2 Battery could support the increased use of renewable power in the generation mix and address the growing need for energy storage on electrical grids.

The CO2 Battery’s optimal charge/discharge cycle ranges from 4 to 24 hours, positioning it perfectly for daily and intra-day cycling. The company points out that this is a fast-growing market segment, not well served by existing battery technologies. Significantly, the CO2 Battery can be charged during the daytime when there is a surplus solar generation and dispatched during the subsequent evening and next-morning peaks, when solar generation falls short of demand. The modular, scalable energy storage solution will allow for solar and wind generation to be dispatchable 24 hours per day.

Using low-cost, off-the-shelf components, the company claims that its CO2 battery achieves a 75–80% round-trip efficiency. Unlike lithium-ion batteries, which degrade significantly in performance after roughly a decade of use, the battery maintains its performance during its expected 25-year operational life. This means the cost of the storage will be about half of the cost of storing with similar-sized lithium-ion batteries.

It seems Intel is set to retake the PC performance crown convincingly with its 12 generation Alder Lake processors, even in the affordable price segment.

A leaked sample of the Core i3-1200 version of the processor has been benchmarked by Chinese hardware site XFASTEST and it crushes the competition in the price segment.

When compared to AMD Zen 2-based Ryzen 3 3300X and 3,100 DIY CPUs, the Intel Core i3-1200 processor paired with the ASRock Z690 Steel Legend WiFi 6E DDR4 motherboard outperformed the AMD processors in most benchmarks as can be seen below:

At its re: Invent 2021 conference today, Amazon announced Graviton3, the next generation of its custom ARM-based chip for AI inferencing applications. Soon to be available in Amazon Web Services (AWS) C7g instances, the company says that the processors are optimized for workloads including high-performance compute, batch processing, media encoding, scientific modeling, ad serving, and distributed analytics.

Alongside Graviton3, Amazon unveiled Trn1, a new instance for training deep learning models in the cloud — including models for apps like image recognition, natural language processing, fraud detection, and forecasting. It’s powered by Trainium, an Amazon-designed chip that the company last year claimed would offer the most teraflops of any machine learning instance in the cloud. (A teraflop translates to a chip being able to process 1 trillion calculations per second.)

As companies face pandemic headwinds including worker shortages and supply chain disruptions, they’re increasingly turning to AI for efficiency gains. According to a recent Algorithmia survey, 50% of enterprises plan to spend more on AI and machine learning in 2021, with 20% saying they will be “significantly” increasing their budgets for AI and ML. AI adoption is, in turn, driving cloud growth — a trend of which Amazon is acutely aware, hence the continued investments in technologies like Graviton3 and Trn1.

The electronics were also improved with a new full-color touchscreen interface and a modular wiring system. An RGB LED lighting system adds nice ambiance and could help users create more exciting time lapse videos of their prints. Prusa is even considering releasing an official, though unsupported, Klipper firmware for those users who have grown to love Klipper in other CoreXY printers.

The most exciting feature by far, however, is the new swappable toolhead system. This is similar to the E3D ToolChanger design and lets the printer switch between different extruders during a print, allowing for multicolor or multi-material prints. An innovative calibration routine ensures that quality doesn’t suffer after a tool change.

Prusa Research hasn’t yet announced an official release date, but you can reserve a pre-order by placing a $200 deposit right now. A semi-assembled Prusa XL with a single toolhead will cost $1,999. A Prusa XL with dual toolheads will cost $2,499 and a Prusa XL with five toolheads will cost $3,499.

According to a new report from Korea, Samsung is considering adding water resistance to its cheaper devices, starting with the Galaxy A33.

Hackers have been increasingly using RTF Template Injection method in widespread phishing attacks.