From BBC NEWS on 5 Jan 2009

By Professor Jim Al-Khalili - University of Surrey

At the very least, he is the undisputed father of modern optics,­ or so we are told at school where our textbooks abound with his famous experiments with lenses and prisms, his study of the nature of light and its reflection, and the refraction and decomposition of light into the colours of the rainbow.

Yet, the truth is rather greyer; and I feel it important to point out that, certainly in the field of optics, Newton himself stood on the shoulders of a giant who lived 700 years earlier.
For, without doubt, another great physicist, who is worthy of ranking up alongside Newton, is an Iraqi scientist born in AD 965 who went by the name of al-Hassan Ibn al-Haytham.

Artist's impression of al-Hassan Ibn al-Haytham (BBC)
An artist's impression of al-Hassan Ibn al-Haytham - Isaac Newton is, as most will agree, the greatest physicist of all time.

I have been led to believe that Abdus Salam (Pakistani theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate in Physics for his work in Electro-Weak Theory) observed that St Paul's cathedral (by Christopher Wren in 1708)and the Taj Mahal (1632) were made roughly at the same time, and were equal feats of engineering prowess. But whereas the European tradition of theoretical science allowed R&D to flourish, the eastern (Indian? Muslim? Arab?) fall due obsequious patronage. Although this comment referred to an event somewhat later it has stuck in my mind.

HPCwire: (17 December 2008)

Grid computing technology has long been the darling of cash-strapped academics in desperate need of raw processing power. Now a ground breaking European research effort has created an industrial-strength platform already appearing in commercial applications.

The SIMDAT project has created a portfolio of tools and services that can finally bring the power of grid computing to industrial applications. Grids capture all the resources of connected computers, from storage to computation.

HPCwire

For those of you who thought Intel was angling for an HPC play with its upcoming Larrabee processor family, think again. In case you're not a regular reader of this publication, Larrabee is Intel's manycore x86 GPU-like processor scheduled to debut in late 2009 or early 2010. With Larrabee, Intel is gearing up to challenge NVIDIA and AMD for GPU leadership, but doesn't appear interested in exploiting the chip for GPGPU.

I subscribe to noseweek - you can find me quoted in the Jan 2009 edition - thanks for nothing guys! Although some of their articles are way off base in my view, such as the Rian Malan rampage through HIV/AIDS [1] (you can find a pdf here [2]) or a version published in The Spectator [3].

I have no doubt that the future is bright for stream based processing (aka GPU's). I can see the use for a hardware architecture that does not stop for memory reads and writes.

HPC wire have a lot today on GPUs:

OpenCL: To GPGPU and Beyond

This week at SIGGRAPH Asia in Singapore, The Khronos Group ratified version 1.0 of the OpenCL specification. In the short term OpenCL is expected to encourage the development of applications that can take advantage of those GPGPUs. But in the long term the implications for HPC may be much more far-reaching. Read More...

Heterogeneous Compilers Ready for Takeoff

The second wave of GPGPU software development tools is upon us. New tools from The Portland Group Inc. (PGI) and French-based CAPS Enterprise enable everyday C and Fortran programmers to tap into GPU acceleration within an integrated heterogeneous computing environment. Read More...

I found a link to Grid Computing Planet. This has a lot of interesting information, as well as links to other resources, such as CIO, etc.

Man, russians have "fun" but with no safety measures...
SonicBomb reports:

As a 36 year old researcher at the Institute for High Energy Physics in Protvino, Anatoli Bugorski used to work with the largest Soviet particle accelerator, the synchrotron U-70. On July 13, 1978, Bugorski was checking a malfunctioning piece of equipment when an accident occurred due to failed safety mechanisms..

A sub-atomic bullet to the head

Anatoli Bugorski Bugorski was leaning over the piece of equipment when he stuck his head in the part through which the proton beam was running. Reportedly, he saw a flash “brighter than a thousand suns”, but did not feel any pain. The beam measured about 2000 gray when it entered Bugorski’s skull, and about 3000 gray when it exited after colliding with the inside of his head inflicting about five hundred times the presumed lethal dose.

The left half of Bugorski’s face swelled up beyond recognition, and over the next several days started peeling off, showing the path that the proton beam (moving near the speed of light) had burned through parts of his face, his bone, and the brain tissue underneath. As it was believed that about 5 to 6 grays is enough to kill a person, Bugorski was taken to a clinic in Moscow where the doctors could observe his expected demise.

I found an interesting link to GoGrid is the world's first multi-server control panel that allows you to deploy and scale load-balanced cloud server networks in minutes.

AMD has clawed back some market interest in the server area.

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=207607

Shanghai @2,7 to bulldozer anything in virtualization
Shangai @ 2,7 ghz VMmark scores are out, kills any living Intel system out there.

shangai @2,7ghz 2p 8core score : 11,22
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vmma...11-12-R805.pdf

harpertown @ 3,33ghz 2p 8core score : 9,15
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vmma...0-09-ML370.pdf

shangai @2,7ghz 4p 16core score : 20,35
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vmma...11-12-R905.pdf

IEEE Spectrum: The African Hacker By G. Pascal Zachary

With home-brewed code and a little help from Microsoft, a programmer in Ghana launches Africa's first software empire

The first time I meet Hermann Chinery-Hesse, he is pouring diesel fuel from a plastic jug into an electric generator. I am in the West African country of Ghana, visiting his software company, Soft Tribe Ltd.

Chinery-Hesse is chief of the Tribe. He's made a small fortune writing software, working as a systems architect, and selling computer code to hundreds of businesses in his country of 21 million people. He drives a Mercedes. He wears imported Birkenstock sandals. He hails from a prominent family, was born in Dublin, and went to college in the United States. He could be working anywhere on the strength of his Irish passport, yet he's spent the past dozen years in Accra, Ghana's coastal capital and one-time slave-trade hub.

This steamy December morning, with deadlines looming, his electricity is out, his programmers are idle, and he's feeding fuel to a balky 50-kilovolt-ampere generator—one of the three he keeps at the ready.

Having emptied his container and thus delivered power to his 18 programmers—about one-tenth of all full-time code writers in Ghana—Chinery-Hesse relaxes and, for the first time, acknowledges my presence. Stroking his beard, he quips, "If we Africans are to develop, we must want to get our hands dirty."