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Try to visualize a beautiful woman. Give it some seconds serious consideration. I shall wait patiently as long...
Now the woman you picture in you head, not only has form and shape, she most likely even have mannerisms and perhaps are wearing clothes. If so we can even with wisdom assume that the clothes she is wearing is consistent with, and thus reflect, the person she is and here is my point. She is to the mental effect almost a person, as your imagination is a VERY powerfull tool. - Mind you not even the Tihane-2 (The Chinese supercomputer) would be able to create in memory what you just did in seconds. (Further more, the Tihane-2 would probably answer that beauty is subjective and continue in long explanations to explain the beauty of binary simplicity, but be quite indifferent as in regard to the beauty of women.)
In your head, from the quest was launched, you started drawing upon your feminine resources of data in your eyes putting together a pretty much ”perfect” women ;o) But make no mistake, in a way she is VERY real, as she is created only and alone from YOUR subconscious imaginative spectrum of what a ”beautiful women” consist of. Those perceptions are not only VERY real, to you it is the whole world and thus, the very definition of beauty.
If you are a crossdresser, transvestite or transexual, you know very well what powers are to be drawn from within that imaginative spectrum, but make no mistake. When ordinary macho heterosexual men watch Expendables 1 (Macho hetero classic - 5 stars from my male side, Lisa says ”No comment!” shaking her head) they very much identify them self, with being amongst such group of battle scarred veterans, knowing each others weaknesses and strengths, using them in unison, like a team, working like clockwork and on backbone alone beating odds no sane person would bet a single dime on.
Women as well have their own visual identification spectrum and I stand accused making following statement without statistic documentation, but I have notion practically all women at some time, have imagined them self walking into a crowded room drawing all attention, dazzling everyone with the mere presence of their radiant beauty. But again, I might be mistaken and women not only may, but trust me will rightfully claim ”What the hell do I REALLY know about women.” and it is in fact quite true.
Never the less there is still much to be obtained from within, the almost magical imaginative spectrum.
You see, something happens to macho heterosexual men, watching not ONLY Expendables 1, but every film made in modern times that has to do with war, fighting, death, violence and murder (several times). Slowly, we find, such identification change such individuals. The same thing happens to T-girls who spend much time in the imaginative female spectrum, they change slowly, becoming more like that in reality as well, changing slowly.
Thus watching many movies on war identifying with being a vengeful warmachine, might actually in a stressfull situation, combined with a life crisis, trigger the hidden imaginative being nurtured by such imagination, making that person pick up a riffle going into warmode showing the world a thing or two. Where as a T-girl in same stressfull life crisis, very well might say ”Fuck it all.” pick up a pair of stilettos and wearing a tight skirt ”showing” (though in a more practical sense) the world a thing or two as well.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory unveiled Summit as the world’s most powerful and smartest scientific supercomputer on June 8, 2018.
With a peak performance of 200,000 trillion calculations per second—or 200 petaflops, Summit will be eight times more powerful than ORNL’s previous top-ranked system, Titan. For certain scientific applications, Summit will also be capable of more than three billion billion mixed precision calculations per second, or 3.3 exaops. Summit will provide unprecedented computing power for research in energy, advanced materials and artificial intelligence (AI), among other domains, enabling scientific discoveries that were previously impractical or impossible.
Credit: Genevieve Martin/ORNL
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory unveiled Summit as the world’s most powerful and smartest scientific supercomputer on June 8, 2018.
With a peak performance of 200,000 trillion calculations per second—or 200 petaflops, Summit will be eight times more powerful than ORNL’s previous top-ranked system, Titan. For certain scientific applications, Summit will also be capable of more than three billion billion mixed precision calculations per second, or 3.3 exaops. Summit will provide unprecedented computing power for research in energy, advanced materials and artificial intelligence (AI), among other domains, enabling scientific discoveries that were previously impractical or impossible.
Credit: Genevieve Martin/ORNL
Computer science, math and physics students meet with faculty to talk about the super computer calculations.
Reconstructions of the path and damage caused by the asteroid that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, in Feb. 15, 2013, provide information about the origin, trajectory and power of the airburst. These details, published in a pair of papers in Nature, may help to refine theoretical models about the likely frequency of such events and potential damage that could be caused.
This 3D simulation of the Chelyabinsk meteor explosion by Mark Boslough was rendered by Brad Carvey using the CTH code on Sandia National Laboratories' Red Sky supercomputer. Andrea Carvey composited the wireframe tail. Photo by Olga Kruglova.
Try to visualize a beautiful woman. Give it some seconds serious consideration. I shall wait patiently as long...
Now the woman you picture in you head, not only has form and shape, she most likely even have mannerisms and perhaps are wearing clothes. If so we can even with wisdom assume that the clothes she is wearing is consistent with, and thus reflect, the person she is and here is my point. She is to the mental effect almost a person, as your imagination is a VERY powerfull tool. - Mind you not even the Tihane-2 (The Chinese supercomputer) would be able to create in memory what you just did in seconds. (Further more, the Tihane-2 would probably answer that beauty is subjective and continue in long explanations to explain the beauty of binary simplicity, but be quite indifferent as in regard to the beauty of women.)
In your head, from the quest was launched, you started drawing upon your feminine resources of data in your eyes putting together a pretty much ”perfect” women ;o) But make no mistake, in a way she is VERY real, as she is created only and alone from YOUR subconscious imaginative spectrum of what a ”beautiful women” consist of. Those perceptions are not only VERY real, to you it is the whole world and thus, the very definition of beauty.
If you are a crossdresser, transvestite or transexual, you know very well what powers are to be drawn from within that imaginative spectrum, but make no mistake. When ordinary macho heterosexual men watch Expendables 1 (Macho hetero classic - 5 stars from my male side, Lisa says ”No comment!” shaking her head) they very much identify them self, with being amongst such group of battle scarred veterans, knowing each others weaknesses and strengths, using them in unison, like a team, working like clockwork and on backbone alone beating odds no sane person would bet a single dime on.
Women as well have their own visual identification spectrum and I stand accused making following statement without statistic documentation, but I have notion practically all women at some time, have imagined them self walking into a crowded room drawing all attention, dazzling everyone with the mere presence of their radiant beauty. But again, I might be mistaken and women not only may, but trust me will rightfully claim ”What the hell do I REALLY know about women.” and it is in fact quite true.
Never the less there is still much to be obtained from within, the almost magical imaginative spectrum.
You see, something happens to macho heterosexual men, watching not ONLY Expendables 1, but every film made in modern times that has to do with war, fighting, death, violence and murder (several times). Slowly, we find, such identification change such individuals. The same thing happens to T-girls who spend much time in the imaginative female spectrum, they change slowly, becoming more like that in reality as well, changing slowly.
Thus watching many movies on war identifying with being a vengeful warmachine, might actually in a stressfull situation, combined with a life crisis, trigger the hidden imaginative being nurtured by such imagination, making that person pick up a riffle going into warmode showing the world a thing or two. Where as a T-girl in same stressfull life crisis, very well might say ”Fuck it all.” pick up a pair of stilettos and wearing a tight skirt ”showing” (though in a more practical sense) the world a thing or two as well.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory unveiled Summit as the world’s most powerful and smartest scientific supercomputer on June 8, 2018.
With a peak performance of 200,000 trillion calculations per second—or 200 petaflops, Summit will be eight times more powerful than ORNL’s previous top-ranked system, Titan. For certain scientific applications, Summit will also be capable of more than three billion billion mixed precision calculations per second, or 3.3 exaops. Summit will provide unprecedented computing power for research in energy, advanced materials and artificial intelligence (AI), among other domains, enabling scientific discoveries that were previously impractical or impossible.
Credit: Genevieve Martin/ORNL
Starring Richard Egan, Constance Dowling, Herbert Marshall, John Wengraf, Philip Van Zandt, and William Schallert. Directed by Herbert L. Strock.
When two scientists at a top-secret government installation devoted to space research are killed -- in their own test chamber, seemingly by an experiment gone awry -- Dr. David Sheppard (Richard Egan) is sent out from Washington to investigate. Sheppard mixes easily enough with the somewhat eccentric team of scientists, though he always seems in danger of being distracted by the presence of Joanne Merritt (Constance Dowling), who serves as the aide to the project director Dr. Van Ness (Herbert Marshall) but is, in reality, another security agent. Sheppard is as puzzled as anyone else by the seemingly inexplicable series of events overtaking the installation -- properly operating equipment suddenly undergoing lethal malfunctions, and the radar tracking aircraft that aren't there -- until he puts it together with the operations of NOVAC (Nuclear Operated Variable Automatic Computer), the central brain of the complex. But the mystery deepens when he discovers that NOVAC was shut down during one of the "accidents" -- and even the computer's operators can't account fully for the whereabouts of GOG and MAGOG, the two robots under the computer's control.
"...and then without warning, the machine became a frankenstein of steel," says the sensationalist poster text. This is the third story in Ivan Tors' OSI trilogy. His first "Office of Scientific Investigation" story was Magnetic Monster in early 1953. The second was Riders to the Stars in early '54. With Gog the loose trilogy is complete. Unlike the Star Wars trilogy in which the stories build upon each other, each of the three OSI stories are separate tales which have nothing to do with each other. The common thread is the idea of there being a sort of Science FBI agency whose job it is, is to check out the scientifically strange. In that regard, Tors' OSI is a bit like a foreshadowing of the X-Files TV series, but without any of the New Age paranormal focus.
In keeping with the previous two stories, Gog is more of a detective murder mystery movie. Tors was a huge fan of "hard" science, not fanciful fiction fluff, so Gog, like the other two movies, is chock full of reveling in sciencey stuff in an almost geeky way. This reverence for real science keeps things from getting out on shaky limb, as many sci-fi films to. The events are much more plausible, less fantastic.
Synopsis
At a secret underground research facility, far out in the desert, scientists working on preparations for a manned space mission, are getting murdered mysteriously. Two agents from the OSI are dispatched to solve the mystery and keep the super secret space station program on track. The scientists are killed in various ways, mostly through equipment malfunctions. The facility director and the agents suspect sabotage. Small transmitter/receiver boxes are found within equipment in different parts of the facility. They suggest that someone on the outside is transmitting in the "malfunctions" in order to kill off the program's scientists. Occasional alarms indicate some flying high intruder, but nothing is clearly found. One of the base's two robots, named Gog, kills another technician while it's mate, Magog, tries to set up an overload within the base's atomic pile. The OSI agents stop Magog with a flame thrower. Meanwhile, interceptor jets scramble and find the highflying spy jet and destroy it with missiles. Once the trouble is past, the Director announces that they will be launching their prototype space station the next day, despite the sabotage attempts to stop it. The End.
The time spent reveling in techno-geekery has a certain Popular Science charm to it. There's an evident gee-whiz air about space and defense sciences which is fun to see. People were fascinated with things rockety and atomic. For various fun bits, see the Notes section.
Gog oozes Cold War from every frame. First is the base's underground location to make them safe from A-bombs. Next is the mysterious killer trying to stop the space station program. The high-flying mystery plane is "not one of ours." (that leaves: Them, and we all knew who they were.) The space station is to be powered by a solar mirror. Even that benign mirror has sinister possibilities. While demonstrating the mirror, the scientists use it to burn a model of a city. "This could happen...if we're not the first to reach space," says the Director. Space is the next "high ground" to be contested. At the end of the movie, when discussing the launch (despite the sabotage attempt) of the prototype space station, the Director says, "Through it's eye, we'll be able to see everything that goes on upon this tired old earth." The Defense Secretary says, "Nothing will take us by surprise again." An obvious reference to Pearl Harbor.
B-films often re-used props and sets from prior films in order to save on their budgets. Gog, even though shot in Eastman Color, was no exception. Two old prop friends show up in Gog. One is our venerable old friend, the space suits from Destination Moon ('50). Look for the centrifuge scene. The research assistants are dressed in them, and as an added bonus, they wear the all-acrylic fish bowl helmets used in Abbot and Costello Go to Mars ('53). Our second old friend is scene in the radar / security room, (the one with the annoying tuning fork device). Check out the monitor wall. It's been gussied up a bit, but it is the spaceship control panel wall from Catwomen of the Moon and Project Moon Base -- complete with the empty 16mm film reels on the right side. It's fun to see old friends.
B-films often include stock footage of military units, tanks, jets, battleships, etc. to fill things out. Gog is no different, and even commits the common continuity error of showing one type of plane taking off, but a different kind in the air.
What amounts to a small treat amid the usual stock footage of jets, some shots of a rather obscure bit of USAF hardware -- the F-94C Starfire with its straight wings and huge wing tanks. In 1954, the Starfire was one of America's coolest combat jets, yet we hear little about it. The swept-wing F-86 Sabers (which we see taxiing and taking off) were the agile fighter which gained fame over Korea. They're common stock footage stars. The F-94, with its onboard radar (in the nose cone) was deemed too advanced to risk falling into enemy hands. So, it didn't see much action , and therefore little fame. The heavier, yet powerful F-94C (one of the first US jets to have an afterburner) was 1954 America's hottest Interceptor -- designed to stop high flying Soviet bombers. It's blatant cameo appearance in Gog, intercepting the high-flying mystery plane, was a fun little bit of patriotic showing off.
The very name of the movie, Gog, is charged with meaning to American audiences of the mid 50s, though virtually lost on viewers of the 21st century. The names of the two robots, Gog and Magog, come from the Bible. More specifically, from the prophecies of Ezekiel (Chapter 38) and the Book of Revelation (chapter 20). While just who they are (nations? kings?) has been debated for centuries, their role as tools of Satan in the battle of Armageddon is clear. Mainstream American patriotic Christendom had settled on the idea that the Soviet Union was the prophesied "nations from the north" who would join Satan to oppose God. This gives the title of the movie a special Cold War significance. It also puts an interesting spin on the Dr. Zeitman character for having named the two robots in the first place. Since they were tools of the mega-computer NOVAC, what was he saying about NOVAC?
It is interesting that the base's radar could not detect the mystery plane (which was beaming in the 'kill' instructions to NOVAC) because it was made of "fiberglass" which rendered it invisible to radar. Now, fiberglass itself isn't sturdy enough for high-speed jets, and it would take until the 1990s before composite materials advanced to make the dream of a stealth aircraft a reality. Nonetheless, the dream (or nightmare) of stealth aircraft was on-screen in 1954 in Gog.
The super computer, NOVAC, controlled everything on the base. Even though the machines were not really killing scientists on their own, but following human orders from the mystery plane, there was the on-screen depiction of machines having a murderous mind of their own. (all pre-Steven King) In the techno starry-eyed 50s, it was fairly uncommon for the technology itself to be turning on its masters. This idea would gain traction later in the 50s, and especially in the 60s, but in '54, it was unusual.
A cautionary subtext to Gog is the danger of trusting in a supercomputer to manage defenses and a whole base. NOVAC doesn't go bad on its own, as the computer will in The Invisible Boy, Hal in 2001 or Colossus in The Forbin Project. In this movie, it was the nefarious "others" who hacked into NOVAC to make it do the killing, but this just demonstrates the danger. People were getting a little nervous about letting machines take over too much responsibility. We were starting to distrust our creations.
Until Gog, robots were fairly humanoid.
They had two legs, two arms, a torso and a head. Audiences had seen the mechanical Maria in Metropolis ('27), the fedora-wearing metal men in Gene Autrey's Phantom Empire serial ('35). The water-heater-like Republic robot appeared in several rocketman serials. There was the gleaming giant Gort in The Day the Earth Stood Still ('51) and the cute left over fedora-dudes in Captain Video ('51). The metal giant in Devil Girl from Mars ('54) was also humaniod, in a chunky way. Gog and Magog were a departure from the stereotype. They were noticeably in-human, which was part of the mood.
Bottom line? Gog seems a bit bland, as far as sci-fi tends to go, but it has a lot in it for fans of 50s sci-fi.
Arsenal (Vienna)
The Vienna Arsenal, object 1
(Pictures you can see by clicking on the link at the end of page!)
The Arsenal in Vienna is a former military complex in the southeast of the city, in the 3rd District of Vienna located. The mighty, consisting of several brick buildings facility is located on a rectangular plan on a hill south of the country Strasser belt (Landstraßer Gürtel).
Meaning
The Arsenal is the most important secular assembly of Romantic Historicism in Vienna and was conducted in Italian-Medieval and Byzantine-Moorish forms. Essentially the system is preserved in its original forms; only the former workshop buildings within the bounding, from the the outside visible wings were replaced by new constructions.
History to 1945
Bird's eye view of the complex, arsenal, lithography Alexander Kaiser, 1855
Vienna Arsenal (Museum of Military History)
Arsenal, with HGM (Heeresgeschichtliches Museum) from the East
The plant, with a total of 31 "objects" (buildings) was built from 1849 to 1856 on the occasion of the March Revolution of 1848 and was the first building of the fortress triangle, the old Vienna's city walls replacing, with the Rossauerstrasse Barracks and the now-defunct Franz Joseph barracks at Stubenring. These buildings should not serve to deter foreign enemies from the city, but to secure state power in the event of revolutionary upheavals in Vienna. The decision to build the Arsenal, it came from the 19-year-old Emperor Franz Joseph I who on 2 December 1848 had come to the throne.
The design for the Imperial Artillery Arsenal came from General Artillery Director Vincenz Freiherr von Augustin, which, subsequently, the site management had been transferred. Under his leadership, the buildings under allocation of sectors have been planned of the architects Carl Roesner, Antonius Pius de Riegel, August Sicard von Sicardsburg, Eduard van der Nüll, Theophil von Hansen and Ludwig Förster and built by the company of the architect Leopold Mayr.
From 1853 to 1856, Arsenal church was built by the architect Carl Roesner. The K.K. Court Weapon Museum, later K.K. Army Museum, now Museum of Military History, housed in a separate representative free-standing wing, was completed structurally in 1856, but was only in 1869 for the first time accessible.
For the construction of the Arsenal 177 million bricks were used. Construction costs totaled $ 8.5 million guilders. In the following years, there have been extensions. During the two world wars, the complex served as a weapons factory and arsenal, especially as barracks.
The record number of employees in Arsenal was reached in the First World War, with around 20,000 staffers. After 1918, the military-industrial operation with own steel mill was transformed into a public service institution with the name "Austrian art arsenal". However, there were almost insoluble conversion problems in the transition to peacetime production, the product range was too great and the mismanagement considerable. The number of employees declined steadily, and the company became one of the great economic scandals of the First Republic.
By the fall of 1938, the area belonged to the 10th District Favoriten. However, as was established during the "Third Reich" the Reich District of Greater Vienna the arsenal complex and the south-east of it lying areas in the wake of district boundary changes became parts of the 3rd District.
During the Second World War, in the Arsenal tank repair workshops of the Waffen-SS were set up. In the last two years of the war several buildings were severely damaged by bombing. During the Battle of Vienna, in the days of 7 to 9 April 1945, was the arsenal, defended by the 3rd SS Panzer Division "Totenkopf", focus of the fighting, the Red Army before their victory recording heavy losses.
History since 1945
Ruins of the object 15 after the air raids 1944
Deposits at the Arsenal Street
After heavy bomb damages during the Second World War, the buildings of the Arsenal were largely restored to their original forms.
In the southern part and in the former courtyard of the arsenal several new buildings were added, among them 1959-1963 the decoration workshops of the Federal Theatre designed by the architects Erich Boltenstern and Robert Weinlich. From 1961 to 1963, the telecommunications central office was built by the architect Fritz Pfeffer. From 1973 to 1975 were built plant and office building of the Post and Telephone Head Office for Vienna, Lower Austria and Burgenland (now Technology Centre Arsenal of Telekom Austria) with the 150-foot radio tower in Vienna Arsenal according to the plans of architect Kurt Eckel. In the 1990s, a rehearsal stage of the castle theater (Burgtheater) was built according to plans by Gustav Peichl.
Also the Austrian Research and Testing Centre Arsenal, now Arsenal Research, which has made itself wordwide a celebrity by one of the largest air chambers (now moved to Floridsdorf - 21st District ), was housed in the complex. A smaller part of the system is still used by the Austrian army as a barracks. Furthermore, the Central Institute for Disinfection of the City of Vienna and the Central Chemical Laboratory of the Federal Monuments Office are housed in the arsenal. The Military History Museum uses multiple objects as depots.
In one part of the area residential buildings were erected. The Arsenal is forming an own, two census tracts encompassing census district, which according to the census in 2001 2.058 inhabitants had.
End of 2003, the arsenal in connection with other properties of the Federal Property Society (BIG - Bundesimmobiliengesellschaft) was sold to a private investor group. Since early 2006, the lawyer of Baden (Lower Austria, not far away from Vienna) Rudolf Fries and industrialist Walter Scherb are majority owners of the 72,000 m2 historic site that they want to refurbish and according to possibility rent new. Fries also plans to enlarge the existing living space by more than half (about 40,000 m2).
An architectural design competition, whose jury on 28 and 29 in June 2007 met, provided proposals amounting to substantial structural changes in the system. Such designed competition winner Hohensinn a futuristic clouds clip modeled after El Lissitzky's cloud bracket, a multi-level horizontal structure on slender stilts over the old stock on the outskirts of the Swiss Garden. The realization of these plans is considered unlikely.
Some objects are since 2013 adapted for use by the Technical University of Vienna: Object 227, the so-called "Panzerhalle" will house laboratories of the Institute for Powertrains and Automotive Technology. In object 221, the "Siemens hall", laboratories of the Institute for Energy Technology and Thermodynamics as well as of the Institute for Manufacturing Technology and High Power Laser Technology are built. In object 214 is besides the Technical Testing and Research Institute (TVFA) also the second expansion stage of the "Vienna Scientific Cluster" housed, of a supercomputer, which was built jointly by the Vienna University of Technology, the University of Vienna and the University of Agricultural Sciences.
Accessibility
The arsenal was historically especially over the Landstraßer Gürtel developed. Today passes southeast in the immediate proximity the Südosttangente called motorway A23 with it connection Gürtel/Landstraßer Hauptstrasse. Southwest of the site runs the Eastern Railway, the new Vienna Central Station closes to the west of the arsenal. Two new bridges over the Eastern Railway, the Arsenal Stay Bridge and the Southern Railway bridge and an underpass as part of Ghegastraße and Alfred- Adler-Straße establish a connection to the on the other side of the railway facilities located Sonnwendviertel in the 10th District, which is being built on the former site of the freight train station Vienna South Station.
On the center side is between Arsenal and Landstraßer Gürtel the former Maria Josefa Park located, now known as Swiss Garden. Here stands at the Arsenalstraße the 21er Haus, a branch of the Austrian Gallery Belvedere, on the center-side edge of the Swiss Garden has the busy suburban main railway route the stop Vienna Quartier Belvedere, next to it the Wiener Linien D (tram) and 69A (bus) run.
Sebastian Buckup, Shinpei Kato, Nikolaus Lang, Angela Wang Nan speaking in the Supercomputers on Wheels session at the Annual Meeting of the New Champions 2023 in Tianjin, People's Republic of China, 28 June 2023. Tianjin Meijiang Convention Center - Room: Hub A. Copyright: World Economic Forum/Benedikt von Loebell
Cray XMP-24 Mainframe
Serial Number 115
The predecessor of this machine, serial number 102, became operational at the National Security Agency in June, 1983. Serial number 102 was the first XMP delivered by Cray to a customer site, and thus was arguably the most powerful supercomputer in the world at that time. It was a Cray XMP22, containing two processors and two meagewords (16 Megabytes) of main memory. The machine consists of three towers: a CPU (central processing unit) and main memory tower, an IOS tower (Input/Output Subsystem) and a SSD tower (solid-state storage device, or extended memory.
In July, 1987, as part of an upgrade, the original mainframe and IOS were replaced. CPU serial number 115 is a Cray XMP24, containing two processors and four meagawords (32 megabytes) of main memory.
.... an overall performance rating of 420 Megaflops. The machine was retired in February, 1993.
The mainframe weighs 5900 pounds.
250 kVA of 60 cycle power was consumed by this machine.
Also see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray_X-MP
In comparison to modern CPU speeds, the X-MP had less than half of the raw power of Microsoft's Xbox console or less than 8% of an Intel Core 2 Duo E6700
i09_0214 152
Just one rack of the Blue Gene/Q supercomputer, seen here with its wiring and cooling tubes exposed, will rapidly perform complex tasks that would require 18 racks of the previous generation of IBM supercomputers.
Brookhaven’s Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN) and the Chemistry Department will use Blue Gene/Q to tease out new ways to put nanoscale materials to work. In particular, Blue Gene/Q will decode and map out the complex array of chemical reactions that can occur on a single nanoparticle with greater speed and precision than ever before.
Starring Richard Egan, Constance Dowling, Herbert Marshall, John Wengraf, Philip Van Zandt, and William Schallert. Directed by Herbert L. Strock.
When two scientists at a top-secret government installation devoted to space research are killed -- in their own test chamber, seemingly by an experiment gone awry -- Dr. David Sheppard (Richard Egan) is sent out from Washington to investigate. Sheppard mixes easily enough with the somewhat eccentric team of scientists, though he always seems in danger of being distracted by the presence of Joanne Merritt (Constance Dowling), who serves as the aide to the project director Dr. Van Ness (Herbert Marshall) but is, in reality, another security agent. Sheppard is as puzzled as anyone else by the seemingly inexplicable series of events overtaking the installation -- properly operating equipment suddenly undergoing lethal malfunctions, and the radar tracking aircraft that aren't there -- until he puts it together with the operations of NOVAC (Nuclear Operated Variable Automatic Computer), the central brain of the complex. But the mystery deepens when he discovers that NOVAC was shut down during one of the "accidents" -- and even the computer's operators can't account fully for the whereabouts of GOG and MAGOG, the two robots under the computer's control.
"...and then without warning, the machine became a frankenstein of steel," says the sensationalist poster text. This is the third story in Ivan Tors' OSI trilogy. His first "Office of Scientific Investigation" story was Magnetic Monster in early 1953. The second was Riders to the Stars in early '54. With Gog the loose trilogy is complete. Unlike the Star Wars trilogy in which the stories build upon each other, each of the three OSI stories are separate tales which have nothing to do with each other. The common thread is the idea of there being a sort of Science FBI agency whose job it is, is to check out the scientifically strange. In that regard, Tors' OSI is a bit like a foreshadowing of the X-Files TV series, but without any of the New Age paranormal focus.
In keeping with the previous two stories, Gog is more of a detective murder mystery movie. Tors was a huge fan of "hard" science, not fanciful fiction fluff, so Gog, like the other two movies, is chock full of reveling in sciencey stuff in an almost geeky way. This reverence for real science keeps things from getting out on shaky limb, as many sci-fi films to. The events are much more plausible, less fantastic.
Synopsis
At a secret underground research facility, far out in the desert, scientists working on preparations for a manned space mission, are getting murdered mysteriously. Two agents from the OSI are dispatched to solve the mystery and keep the super secret space station program on track. The scientists are killed in various ways, mostly through equipment malfunctions. The facility director and the agents suspect sabotage. Small transmitter/receiver boxes are found within equipment in different parts of the facility. They suggest that someone on the outside is transmitting in the "malfunctions" in order to kill off the program's scientists. Occasional alarms indicate some flying high intruder, but nothing is clearly found. One of the base's two robots, named Gog, kills another technician while it's mate, Magog, tries to set up an overload within the base's atomic pile. The OSI agents stop Magog with a flame thrower. Meanwhile, interceptor jets scramble and find the highflying spy jet and destroy it with missiles. Once the trouble is past, the Director announces that they will be launching their prototype space station the next day, despite the sabotage attempts to stop it. The End.
The time spent reveling in techno-geekery has a certain Popular Science charm to it. There's an evident gee-whiz air about space and defense sciences which is fun to see. People were fascinated with things rockety and atomic. For various fun bits, see the Notes section.
Gog oozes Cold War from every frame. First is the base's underground location to make them safe from A-bombs. Next is the mysterious killer trying to stop the space station program. The high-flying mystery plane is "not one of ours." (that leaves: Them, and we all knew who they were.) The space station is to be powered by a solar mirror. Even that benign mirror has sinister possibilities. While demonstrating the mirror, the scientists use it to burn a model of a city. "This could happen...if we're not the first to reach space," says the Director. Space is the next "high ground" to be contested. At the end of the movie, when discussing the launch (despite the sabotage attempt) of the prototype space station, the Director says, "Through it's eye, we'll be able to see everything that goes on upon this tired old earth." The Defense Secretary says, "Nothing will take us by surprise again." An obvious reference to Pearl Harbor.
B-films often re-used props and sets from prior films in order to save on their budgets. Gog, even though shot in Eastman Color, was no exception. Two old prop friends show up in Gog. One is our venerable old friend, the space suits from Destination Moon ('50). Look for the centrifuge scene. The research assistants are dressed in them, and as an added bonus, they wear the all-acrylic fish bowl helmets used in Abbot and Costello Go to Mars ('53). Our second old friend is scene in the radar / security room, (the one with the annoying tuning fork device). Check out the monitor wall. It's been gussied up a bit, but it is the spaceship control panel wall from Catwomen of the Moon and Project Moon Base -- complete with the empty 16mm film reels on the right side. It's fun to see old friends.
B-films often include stock footage of military units, tanks, jets, battleships, etc. to fill things out. Gog is no different, and even commits the common continuity error of showing one type of plane taking off, but a different kind in the air.
What amounts to a small treat amid the usual stock footage of jets, some shots of a rather obscure bit of USAF hardware -- the F-94C Starfire with its straight wings and huge wing tanks. In 1954, the Starfire was one of America's coolest combat jets, yet we hear little about it. The swept-wing F-86 Sabers (which we see taxiing and taking off) were the agile fighter which gained fame over Korea. They're common stock footage stars. The F-94, with its onboard radar (in the nose cone) was deemed too advanced to risk falling into enemy hands. So, it didn't see much action , and therefore little fame. The heavier, yet powerful F-94C (one of the first US jets to have an afterburner) was 1954 America's hottest Interceptor -- designed to stop high flying Soviet bombers. It's blatant cameo appearance in Gog, intercepting the high-flying mystery plane, was a fun little bit of patriotic showing off.
The very name of the movie, Gog, is charged with meaning to American audiences of the mid 50s, though virtually lost on viewers of the 21st century. The names of the two robots, Gog and Magog, come from the Bible. More specifically, from the prophecies of Ezekiel (Chapter 38) and the Book of Revelation (chapter 20). While just who they are (nations? kings?) has been debated for centuries, their role as tools of Satan in the battle of Armageddon is clear. Mainstream American patriotic Christendom had settled on the idea that the Soviet Union was the prophesied "nations from the north" who would join Satan to oppose God. This gives the title of the movie a special Cold War significance. It also puts an interesting spin on the Dr. Zeitman character for having named the two robots in the first place. Since they were tools of the mega-computer NOVAC, what was he saying about NOVAC?
It is interesting that the base's radar could not detect the mystery plane (which was beaming in the 'kill' instructions to NOVAC) because it was made of "fiberglass" which rendered it invisible to radar. Now, fiberglass itself isn't sturdy enough for high-speed jets, and it would take until the 1990s before composite materials advanced to make the dream of a stealth aircraft a reality. Nonetheless, the dream (or nightmare) of stealth aircraft was on-screen in 1954 in Gog.
The super computer, NOVAC, controlled everything on the base. Even though the machines were not really killing scientists on their own, but following human orders from the mystery plane, there was the on-screen depiction of machines having a murderous mind of their own. (all pre-Steven King) In the techno starry-eyed 50s, it was fairly uncommon for the technology itself to be turning on its masters. This idea would gain traction later in the 50s, and especially in the 60s, but in '54, it was unusual.
A cautionary subtext to Gog is the danger of trusting in a supercomputer to manage defenses and a whole base. NOVAC doesn't go bad on its own, as the computer will in The Invisible Boy, Hal in 2001 or Colossus in The Forbin Project. In this movie, it was the nefarious "others" who hacked into NOVAC to make it do the killing, but this just demonstrates the danger. People were getting a little nervous about letting machines take over too much responsibility. We were starting to distrust our creations.
Until Gog, robots were fairly humanoid.
They had two legs, two arms, a torso and a head. Audiences had seen the mechanical Maria in Metropolis ('27), the fedora-wearing metal men in Gene Autrey's Phantom Empire serial ('35). The water-heater-like Republic robot appeared in several rocketman serials. There was the gleaming giant Gort in The Day the Earth Stood Still ('51) and the cute left over fedora-dudes in Captain Video ('51). The metal giant in Devil Girl from Mars ('54) was also humaniod, in a chunky way. Gog and Magog were a departure from the stereotype. They were noticeably in-human, which was part of the mood.
Bottom line? Gog seems a bit bland, as far as sci-fi tends to go, but it has a lot in it for fans of 50s sci-fi.
Cray XMP-24 Mainframe
Serial Number 115
The predecessor of this machine, serial number 102, became operational at the National Security Agency in June, 1983. Serial number 102 was the first XMP delivered by Cray to a customer site, and thus was arguably the most powerful supercomputer in the world at that time. It was a Cray XMP22, containing two processors and two meagewords (16 Megabytes) of main memory. The machine consists of three towers: a CPU (central processing unit) and main memory tower, an IOS tower (Input/Output Subsystem) and a SSD tower (solid-state storage device, or extended memory.
In July, 1987, as part of an upgrade, the original mainframe and IOS were replaced. CPU serial number 115 is a Cray XMP24, containing two processors and four meagawords (32 megabytes) of main memory.
.... an overall performance rating of 420 Megaflops. The machine was retired in February, 1993.
The mainframe weighs 5900 pounds.
250 kVA of 60 cycle power was consumed by this machine.
Also see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray_X-MP
In comparison to modern CPU speeds, the X-MP had less than half of the raw power of Microsoft's Xbox console or less than 8% of an Intel Core 2 Duo E6700
i09_0214 153
Peter Littlewood, Director of Argonne National Laboratory, addresses the press flanked by industry and government partners.
31102D, Aurora Press Conference with ANL, Intel, and Cray
Photographer: Mark Lopez
Sebastian Buckup, Shinpei Kato, Nikolaus Lang, Angela Wang Nan speaking in the Supercomputers on Wheels session at the Annual Meeting of the New Champions 2023 in Tianjin, People's Republic of China, 28 June 2023. Tianjin Meijiang Convention Center - Room: Hub A. Copyright: World Economic Forum/Benedikt von Loebell
#HpComputer, #HPEnterprise, #HpLaptop, #HpMachine, #HPSupercomputer, #LatestHpTechnology Click here viralterm.com/hp-new-supercomputer-8000-times-fast
Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything (42). In the first novel and radio series, a group of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings demand to learn the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything from the supercomputer, Deep Thought, specially built for this purpose. It takes Deep Thought 7½ million years to compute and check the answer, which turns out to be 42. The Ultimate Question itself is unknown. When asked to produce The Ultimate Question, Deep Thought says that it cannot; however, it can help to design an even more powerful computer, the Earth, that can. The programmers then embark on a further ten-million-year program to discover The Ultimate Question. This new computer will incorporate living beings in the "computational matrix", with the pan-dimensional creators assuming the form of mice. The process is hindered after eight million years by the unexpected arrival on Earth of the Golgafrinchans and then is ruined completely, five minutes before completion, when the Earth is destroyed by the Vogons to make way for a new Hyperspace Bypass. This is later revealed to have been a ruse: the Vogons had been hired to destroy the Earth by a consortium of psychiatrists, led by Gag Halfrunt, who feared for the loss of their careers when the meaning of life became known. Lacking a real question, the mice decide not to go through the whole thing again and settle for the out-of-thin-air suggestion "How many roads must a man walk down?" from Bob Dylan's song "Blowin' in the Wind". At the end of the radio series (and television series, as well as the novel The Restaurant at the End of the Universe) Arthur Dent, having escaped the Earth's destruction, potentially has some of the computational matrix in his brain. He attempts to discover The Ultimate Question by extracting it from his brainwave patterns, as abusively suggested by Ford Prefect, when a Scrabble-playing caveman spells out forty two. Arthur pulls random letters from a bag, but only gets the sentence "What do you get if you multiply six by nine?" "Six by nine. Forty two." "That's it. That's all there is." "I always thought something was fundamentally wrong with the universe" Six times nine is, of course, fifty-four. The program on the "Earth computer" should have run correctly, but the unexpected arrival of the Golgafrinchans on prehistoric Earth caused input errors into the system—computing (because of the garbage in, garbage out rule) the wrong question—the question in Arthur's subconscious being invalid all along. Quoting Fit the Seventh of the radio series, on Christmas Eve, 1978: Narrator: There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened. Some readers subsequently noticed that 613 × 913 = 4213 (using base 13). Douglas Adams later joked about this observation, saying, "I may be a sorry case, but I don't write jokes in base 13." In Life, the Universe and Everything, Prak, a man who knows all that is true, confirms that 42 is indeed The Answer, and confirms that it is impossible for both The Answer and The Question to be known about in the same universe (compare the uncertainty principle) as they will cancel each other out and take the Universe with them to be replaced by something even more bizarre (as described in the first theory) and that it may have already happened (as described in the second). Though the question is never found, 42 is shown as the table number at which Arthur and his friends sit when they arrive at Milliways at the end of the radio series. Likewise, Mostly Harmless ends when Arthur stops at a street address identified by his cry of, "There, number 42!" and enters the club Beta, owned by Stavro Mueller (Stavromula Beta). Shortly after, the earth is destroyed in all existing incarnations. The number 42 Douglas Adams was asked many times why he chose the number 42. Many theories were proposed, including the fact that 42 is 101010 in binary code, the fact that light refracts off water by 42 degrees to create a rainbow, the fact that light requires 10−42 seconds to cross the diameter of a proton. Adams rejected them all. On November 3, 1993, he gave an answer on alt.fan.douglas-adams: The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought '42 will do'. I typed it out. End of story. Adams described his choice as 'a completely ordinary number, a number not just divisible by two but also six and seven. In fact it's the sort of number that you could without any fear introduce to your parents'. While 42 was a number with no hidden meaning, Adams explained in more detail in an interview with Iain Johnstone of BBC Radio 4 (recorded in 1998 though never broadcast) to celebrate the first radio broadcast's 20th anniversary. Having decided it should be a number, he tried to think what an "ordinary number" should be. He ruled out non-integers, then he remembered having worked as a "prop-borrower" for John Cleese on his Video Arts training videos. Cleese needed a funny number for the punchline to a sketch involving a bank teller (himself) and a customer (Tim Brooke-Taylor). Adams believed that the number that Cleese came up with was 42 and he decided to use it. Adams also had written a sketch for The Burkiss Way called "42 Logical Positivism Avenue", broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 12 January 1977[10] – 14 months before the Hitchhiker's Guide first broadcast "42" in fit the fourth, 29 March 1978. In January 2000, in response to a panelist's "Where does the number 42 come from?" on the radio show "Book Club" Adams explained that he was "on his way to work one morning, whilst still writing the scene, and was thinking about what the actual answer should be. He eventually decided that it should be something that made no sense whatsoever- a number, and a mundane one at that. And that is how he arrived at the number 42, completely at random." Stephen Fry, a friend of Adams, claims that Adams told him "exactly why 42", and that the reason is "fascinating, extraordinary and, when you think hard about it, completely obvious." However, Fry says that he has vowed not to tell anyone the secret, and that it must go with him to the grave. John Lloyd, Adams' collaborator on The Meaning of Liff and two Hitchhiker's fits, said that Douglas has called 42 "the funniest of the two-digit numbers." The number 42 also appears frequently in the work of Lewis Carroll, and some critics have suggested that this was an influence. Other purported Carroll influences include that Adams named the episodes of the original radio series of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy "fits", the word Carroll used to name the chapters of The Hunting of the Snark. There is the persistent tale that forty-two is actually Adams' tribute to the indefatigable paperback book, and is really the average number of lines on an average page of an average paperback book. On the Internet The number 42 and the phrase, "Life, the universe, and everything" have attained cult status on the Internet. "Life, the Universe, and Everything" is a common name for the off-topic section of an Internet forum and the phrase is invoked in similar ways to mean "anything at all". Many chatbots, when asked about the meaning of life, will answer "42". Several online calculators are also programmed with the Question. If you type the answer to life the universe and everything into Google (without quotes or capitalising the small words), the Google Calculator will give you 42, as will Wolfram's Computational Knowledge Engine. Similarly, if you type the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything into DuckDuckGo, the 0-click box will read "42".[19] In the online community Second Life, there is a section on a sim called "42nd Life." It is devoted to this concept in the book series, and several attempts at recreating Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, were made. In the OpenOffice.org software, if you type into any cell of a spreadsheet =ANTWORT("Das Leben, das Universum und der ganze Rest"), which means the answer to life, the universe and everything, the result is 42.[20] ISO/IEC 14519-2001/ IEEE Std 1003.5-1999, IEEE Standard for Information Technology - POSIX(R) Ada Language Interfaces - Part 1: Binding for System Application Program Interface (API) , uses the number '42' as the required return value from a process that terminates due to an unhandled exception. The Rationale says "the choice of the value 42 is arbitrary" and cites the Adams book as the source of the value. The random seed chosen to procedurally create the whole universe including all the regions, constellations, stars, planets, moons and mineral distribution of the online massively multi-player computer game EVE Online was chosen as 42 by its lead game designer in 2002. Cultural references The Allen Telescope Array, a radio telescope used by SETI, has 42 dishes in homage to the Answer. In the TV show Lost, 42 is the last of the mysterious numbers, 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, and 42. In an interview with Lostpedia, producer David Fury confirmed this was a reference to Hitchhiker's. The TV show The Kumars at No. 42 is so named because show creator Sanjeev Bhaskar is a Hitchhiker's fan.[24] The band Coldplay's album Viva la Vida includes a song called "42". When asked by Q magazine if the song's title was Hitchhiker's-related, Chris Martin said, "It is and it isn't." The band Level 42 chose its name in reference to the book. The episode "42" of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who was named in reference to the Answer. Writer Chris Chibnall acknowledged that "it's a playful title". Ken Jennings, defeated along with Brad Rutter in a Jeopardy match against IBM's Watson, writes that Watson's avatar which appeared on-screen for those games showed 42 "threads of thought," and that the number was chosen in reference to this meme.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory unveiled Summit as the world’s most powerful and smartest scientific supercomputer on June 8, 2018.
With a peak performance of 200,000 trillion calculations per second—or 200 petaflops, Summit will be eight times more powerful than ORNL’s previous top-ranked system, Titan. For certain scientific applications, Summit will also be capable of more than three billion billion mixed precision calculations per second, or 3.3 exaops. Summit will provide unprecedented computing power for research in energy, advanced materials and artificial intelligence (AI), among other domains, enabling scientific discoveries that were previously impractical or impossible.
Credit: Genevieve Martin/ORNL
Learn more: www.olcf.ornl.gov/summit/
Two rows of the “Discover” supercomputer at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) contain more than 4,000 computer processors. Discover has a total of nearly 15,000 processors. Credit: NASA/Pat Izzo To learn more about NCCS go to: www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/climate-sim-center.html ( www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/climate-sim-center.html ) NASA Goddard Space Flight Center is home to the nation's largest organization of combined scientists, engineers and technologists that build spacecraft, instruments and new technology to study the Earth, the sun, our solar system, and the universe.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory unveiled Summit as the world’s most powerful and smartest scientific supercomputer on June 8, 2018.
With a peak performance of 200,000 trillion calculations per second—or 200 petaflops, Summit will be eight times more powerful than ORNL’s previous top-ranked system, Titan. For certain scientific applications, Summit will also be capable of more than three billion billion mixed precision calculations per second, or 3.3 exaops. Summit will provide unprecedented computing power for research in energy, advanced materials and artificial intelligence (AI), among other domains, enabling scientific discoveries that were previously impractical or impossible.
Credit: Genevieve Martin/ORNL
Learn more: www.olcf.ornl.gov/summit/
"Each cube represents the same moment in time, of a space 100,000 times smaller than an atom, in a theory describing interactions of elementary particles.
Like all space, it is filled with objects known as instantons, which describe the properties of some of the interactions. The problem with observing instantons is that they are obscured by noise—much like needles hidden in a haystack.
Cooling the system, seen as we move down the columns, allows us to find the instantons—akin to carefully removing the hay strand by strand, leaving only the needles behind. Moving around the ring takes us to a different point in time.
Part of the Theoretical Physics group’s research in lattice theory involves observing instantons in numerical models. The image visually represents the output of a program developed to do this. Related codes developed by members of the group have been adapted to test the performance of supercomputers."
The Frontier supercomputer at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory earned the top ranking on May 30 2022, as the world’s fastest on the 59th TOP500 list, with 1.1 exaflops of performance. The system is the first to achieve the level of computing performance known as exascale, a threshold of a quintillion calculations per second.
Arsenal (Vienna)
The Vienna Arsenal, object 1
(Pictures you can see by clicking on the link at the end of page!)
The Arsenal in Vienna is a former military complex in the southeast of the city, in the 3rd District of Vienna located. The mighty, consisting of several brick buildings facility is located on a rectangular plan on a hill south of the country Strasser belt (Landstraßer Gürtel).
Meaning
The Arsenal is the most important secular assembly of Romantic Historicism in Vienna and was conducted in Italian-Medieval and Byzantine-Moorish forms. Essentially the system is preserved in its original forms; only the former workshop buildings within the bounding, from the the outside visible wings were replaced by new constructions.
History to 1945
Bird's eye view of the complex, arsenal, lithography Alexander Kaiser, 1855
Vienna Arsenal (Museum of Military History)
Arsenal, with HGM (Heeresgeschichtliches Museum) from the East
The plant, with a total of 31 "objects" (buildings) was built from 1849 to 1856 on the occasion of the March Revolution of 1848 and was the first building of the fortress triangle, the old Vienna's city walls replacing, with the Rossauerstrasse Barracks and the now-defunct Franz Joseph barracks at Stubenring. These buildings should not serve to deter foreign enemies from the city, but to secure state power in the event of revolutionary upheavals in Vienna. The decision to build the Arsenal, it came from the 19-year-old Emperor Franz Joseph I who on 2 December 1848 had come to the throne.
The design for the Imperial Artillery Arsenal came from General Artillery Director Vincenz Freiherr von Augustin, which, subsequently, the site management had been transferred. Under his leadership, the buildings under allocation of sectors have been planned of the architects Carl Roesner, Antonius Pius de Riegel, August Sicard von Sicardsburg, Eduard van der Nüll, Theophil von Hansen and Ludwig Förster and built by the company of the architect Leopold Mayr.
From 1853 to 1856, Arsenal church was built by the architect Carl Roesner. The K.K. Court Weapon Museum, later K.K. Army Museum, now Museum of Military History, housed in a separate representative free-standing wing, was completed structurally in 1856, but was only in 1869 for the first time accessible.
For the construction of the Arsenal 177 million bricks were used. Construction costs totaled $ 8.5 million guilders. In the following years, there have been extensions. During the two world wars, the complex served as a weapons factory and arsenal, especially as barracks.
The record number of employees in Arsenal was reached in the First World War, with around 20,000 staffers. After 1918, the military-industrial operation with own steel mill was transformed into a public service institution with the name "Austrian art arsenal". However, there were almost insoluble conversion problems in the transition to peacetime production, the product range was too great and the mismanagement considerable. The number of employees declined steadily, and the company became one of the great economic scandals of the First Republic.
By the fall of 1938, the area belonged to the 10th District Favoriten. However, as was established during the "Third Reich" the Reich District of Greater Vienna the arsenal complex and the south-east of it lying areas in the wake of district boundary changes became parts of the 3rd District.
During the Second World War, in the Arsenal tank repair workshops of the Waffen-SS were set up. In the last two years of the war several buildings were severely damaged by bombing. During the Battle of Vienna, in the days of 7 to 9 April 1945, was the arsenal, defended by the 3rd SS Panzer Division "Totenkopf", focus of the fighting, the Red Army before their victory recording heavy losses.
History since 1945
Ruins of the object 15 after the air raids 1944
Deposits at the Arsenal Street
After heavy bomb damages during the Second World War, the buildings of the Arsenal were largely restored to their original forms.
In the southern part and in the former courtyard of the arsenal several new buildings were added, among them 1959-1963 the decoration workshops of the Federal Theatre designed by the architects Erich Boltenstern and Robert Weinlich. From 1961 to 1963, the telecommunications central office was built by the architect Fritz Pfeffer. From 1973 to 1975 were built plant and office building of the Post and Telephone Head Office for Vienna, Lower Austria and Burgenland (now Technology Centre Arsenal of Telekom Austria) with the 150-foot radio tower in Vienna Arsenal according to the plans of architect Kurt Eckel. In the 1990s, a rehearsal stage of the castle theater (Burgtheater) was built according to plans by Gustav Peichl.
Also the Austrian Research and Testing Centre Arsenal, now Arsenal Research, which has made itself wordwide a celebrity by one of the largest air chambers (now moved to Floridsdorf - 21st District ), was housed in the complex. A smaller part of the system is still used by the Austrian army as a barracks. Furthermore, the Central Institute for Disinfection of the City of Vienna and the Central Chemical Laboratory of the Federal Monuments Office are housed in the arsenal. The Military History Museum uses multiple objects as depots.
In one part of the area residential buildings were erected. The Arsenal is forming an own, two census tracts encompassing census district, which according to the census in 2001 2.058 inhabitants had.
End of 2003, the arsenal in connection with other properties of the Federal Property Society (BIG - Bundesimmobiliengesellschaft) was sold to a private investor group. Since early 2006, the lawyer of Baden (Lower Austria, not far away from Vienna) Rudolf Fries and industrialist Walter Scherb are majority owners of the 72,000 m2 historic site that they want to refurbish and according to possibility rent new. Fries also plans to enlarge the existing living space by more than half (about 40,000 m2).
An architectural design competition, whose jury on 28 and 29 in June 2007 met, provided proposals amounting to substantial structural changes in the system. Such designed competition winner Hohensinn a futuristic clouds clip modeled after El Lissitzky's cloud bracket, a multi-level horizontal structure on slender stilts over the old stock on the outskirts of the Swiss Garden. The realization of these plans is considered unlikely.
Some objects are since 2013 adapted for use by the Technical University of Vienna: Object 227, the so-called "Panzerhalle" will house laboratories of the Institute for Powertrains and Automotive Technology. In object 221, the "Siemens hall", laboratories of the Institute for Energy Technology and Thermodynamics as well as of the Institute for Manufacturing Technology and High Power Laser Technology are built. In object 214 is besides the Technical Testing and Research Institute (TVFA) also the second expansion stage of the "Vienna Scientific Cluster" housed, of a supercomputer, which was built jointly by the Vienna University of Technology, the University of Vienna and the University of Agricultural Sciences.
Accessibility
The arsenal was historically especially over the Landstraßer Gürtel developed. Today passes southeast in the immediate proximity the Südosttangente called motorway A23 with it connection Gürtel/Landstraßer Hauptstrasse. Southwest of the site runs the Eastern Railway, the new Vienna Central Station closes to the west of the arsenal. Two new bridges over the Eastern Railway, the Arsenal Stay Bridge and the Southern Railway bridge and an underpass as part of Ghegastraße and Alfred- Adler-Straße establish a connection to the on the other side of the railway facilities located Sonnwendviertel in the 10th District, which is being built on the former site of the freight train station Vienna South Station.
On the center side is between Arsenal and Landstraßer Gürtel the former Maria Josefa Park located, now known as Swiss Garden. Here stands at the Arsenalstraße the 21er Haus, a branch of the Austrian Gallery Belvedere, on the center-side edge of the Swiss Garden has the busy suburban main railway route the stop Vienna Quartier Belvedere, next to it the Wiener Linien D (tram) and 69A (bus) run.
Arsenal (Vienna)
The Vienna Arsenal, object 1
(Pictures you can see by clicking on the link at the end of page!)
The Arsenal in Vienna is a former military complex in the southeast of the city, in the 3rd District of Vienna located. The mighty, consisting of several brick buildings facility is located on a rectangular plan on a hill south of the country Strasser belt (Landstraßer Gürtel).
Meaning
The Arsenal is the most important secular assembly of Romantic Historicism in Vienna and was conducted in Italian-Medieval and Byzantine-Moorish forms. Essentially the system is preserved in its original forms; only the former workshop buildings within the bounding, from the the outside visible wings were replaced by new constructions.
History to 1945
Bird's eye view of the complex, arsenal, lithography Alexander Kaiser, 1855
Vienna Arsenal (Museum of Military History)
Arsenal, with HGM (Heeresgeschichtliches Museum) from the East
The plant, with a total of 31 "objects" (buildings) was built from 1849 to 1856 on the occasion of the March Revolution of 1848 and was the first building of the fortress triangle, the old Vienna's city walls replacing, with the Rossauerstrasse Barracks and the now-defunct Franz Joseph barracks at Stubenring. These buildings should not serve to deter foreign enemies from the city, but to secure state power in the event of revolutionary upheavals in Vienna. The decision to build the Arsenal, it came from the 19-year-old Emperor Franz Joseph I who on 2 December 1848 had come to the throne.
The design for the Imperial Artillery Arsenal came from General Artillery Director Vincenz Freiherr von Augustin, which, subsequently, the site management had been transferred. Under his leadership, the buildings under allocation of sectors have been planned of the architects Carl Roesner, Antonius Pius de Riegel, August Sicard von Sicardsburg, Eduard van der Nüll, Theophil von Hansen and Ludwig Förster and built by the company of the architect Leopold Mayr.
From 1853 to 1856, Arsenal church was built by the architect Carl Roesner. The K.K. Court Weapon Museum, later K.K. Army Museum, now Museum of Military History, housed in a separate representative free-standing wing, was completed structurally in 1856, but was only in 1869 for the first time accessible.
For the construction of the Arsenal 177 million bricks were used. Construction costs totaled $ 8.5 million guilders. In the following years, there have been extensions. During the two world wars, the complex served as a weapons factory and arsenal, especially as barracks.
The record number of employees in Arsenal was reached in the First World War, with around 20,000 staffers. After 1918, the military-industrial operation with own steel mill was transformed into a public service institution with the name "Austrian art arsenal". However, there were almost insoluble conversion problems in the transition to peacetime production, the product range was too great and the mismanagement considerable. The number of employees declined steadily, and the company became one of the great economic scandals of the First Republic.
By the fall of 1938, the area belonged to the 10th District Favoriten. However, as was established during the "Third Reich" the Reich District of Greater Vienna the arsenal complex and the south-east of it lying areas in the wake of district boundary changes became parts of the 3rd District.
During the Second World War, in the Arsenal tank repair workshops of the Waffen-SS were set up. In the last two years of the war several buildings were severely damaged by bombing. During the Battle of Vienna, in the days of 7 to 9 April 1945, was the arsenal, defended by the 3rd SS Panzer Division "Totenkopf", focus of the fighting, the Red Army before their victory recording heavy losses.
History since 1945
Ruins of the object 15 after the air raids 1944
Deposits at the Arsenal Street
After heavy bomb damages during the Second World War, the buildings of the Arsenal were largely restored to their original forms.
In the southern part and in the former courtyard of the arsenal several new buildings were added, among them 1959-1963 the decoration workshops of the Federal Theatre designed by the architects Erich Boltenstern and Robert Weinlich. From 1961 to 1963, the telecommunications central office was built by the architect Fritz Pfeffer. From 1973 to 1975 were built plant and office building of the Post and Telephone Head Office for Vienna, Lower Austria and Burgenland (now Technology Centre Arsenal of Telekom Austria) with the 150-foot radio tower in Vienna Arsenal according to the plans of architect Kurt Eckel. In the 1990s, a rehearsal stage of the castle theater (Burgtheater) was built according to plans by Gustav Peichl.
Also the Austrian Research and Testing Centre Arsenal, now Arsenal Research, which has made itself wordwide a celebrity by one of the largest air chambers (now moved to Floridsdorf - 21st District ), was housed in the complex. A smaller part of the system is still used by the Austrian army as a barracks. Furthermore, the Central Institute for Disinfection of the City of Vienna and the Central Chemical Laboratory of the Federal Monuments Office are housed in the arsenal. The Military History Museum uses multiple objects as depots.
In one part of the area residential buildings were erected. The Arsenal is forming an own, two census tracts encompassing census district, which according to the census in 2001 2.058 inhabitants had.
End of 2003, the arsenal in connection with other properties of the Federal Property Society (BIG - Bundesimmobiliengesellschaft) was sold to a private investor group. Since early 2006, the lawyer of Baden (Lower Austria, not far away from Vienna) Rudolf Fries and industrialist Walter Scherb are majority owners of the 72,000 m2 historic site that they want to refurbish and according to possibility rent new. Fries also plans to enlarge the existing living space by more than half (about 40,000 m2).
An architectural design competition, whose jury on 28 and 29 in June 2007 met, provided proposals amounting to substantial structural changes in the system. Such designed competition winner Hohensinn a futuristic clouds clip modeled after El Lissitzky's cloud bracket, a multi-level horizontal structure on slender stilts over the old stock on the outskirts of the Swiss Garden. The realization of these plans is considered unlikely.
Some objects are since 2013 adapted for use by the Technical University of Vienna: Object 227, the so-called "Panzerhalle" will house laboratories of the Institute for Powertrains and Automotive Technology. In object 221, the "Siemens hall", laboratories of the Institute for Energy Technology and Thermodynamics as well as of the Institute for Manufacturing Technology and High Power Laser Technology are built. In object 214 is besides the Technical Testing and Research Institute (TVFA) also the second expansion stage of the "Vienna Scientific Cluster" housed, of a supercomputer, which was built jointly by the Vienna University of Technology, the University of Vienna and the University of Agricultural Sciences.
Accessibility
The arsenal was historically especially over the Landstraßer Gürtel developed. Today passes southeast in the immediate proximity the Südosttangente called motorway A23 with it connection Gürtel/Landstraßer Hauptstrasse. Southwest of the site runs the Eastern Railway, the new Vienna Central Station closes to the west of the arsenal. Two new bridges over the Eastern Railway, the Arsenal Stay Bridge and the Southern Railway bridge and an underpass as part of Ghegastraße and Alfred- Adler-Straße establish a connection to the on the other side of the railway facilities located Sonnwendviertel in the 10th District, which is being built on the former site of the freight train station Vienna South Station.
On the center side is between Arsenal and Landstraßer Gürtel the former Maria Josefa Park located, now known as Swiss Garden. Here stands at the Arsenalstraße the 21er Haus, a branch of the Austrian Gallery Belvedere, on the center-side edge of the Swiss Garden has the busy suburban main railway route the stop Vienna Quartier Belvedere, next to it the Wiener Linien D (tram) and 69A (bus) run.
Big supercomputers bring big challenges—especially when it comes to storing all the data such large-scale systems generate. Sarp Oral, the storage team lead for the Technology Integration Group (TechInt) at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), knows well the struggles and rewards associated with the delivery of a capable file system.
The OLCF’s IBM AC922 Summit, predicted to be one of the fastest supercomputers in the world when it comes online this year, will require a file system that can store and retrieve the scientific data generated by researchers at the OLCF, a US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility located at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). Members of various groups at the OLCF, including TechInt and the High-Performance Computing Operations (HPC Ops) Group, have risen to the task.
Oral is responsible for the delivery of Summit’s I/O subsystem, an environment that handles the work for the input and output of the system. Other subsystems manage the network, the compute nodes, and the scheduler.
+ Read more: www.olcf.ornl.gov/2018/05/01/faces-of-summit-tackling-sto...
Summit is the fastest supercomputer in the world, according to the TOP500 list, which ranks global computing systems. Summit is the third ORNL system to top this list, preceded by the Jaguar and Titan supercomputers. Representatives from ORNL, IBM, NVIDIA, Red Hat, and Mellanox Technologies accepted the award at the ISC High Performance conference in Frankfurt, Germany.
+ Read more: www.ornl.gov/news/ornl-s-summit-supercomputer-named-world...
Image credit: NVIDIA
The Faces of Summit series shares stories of people working to stand up America’s next top supercomputer for open science, the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility’s Summit. The next-generation machine is scheduled to come online in 2018.
At the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), supercomputing staff and users are already talking about what kinds of science problems they will be able to solve once they “get on Summit.”
But before they run their science applications on the 200-petaflop IBM AC922 supercomputer later this year, they will have to go through the system’s batch scheduler and job launcher.
+ Read more: www.olcf.ornl.gov/2018/05/01/faces-of-summit-preparing-to...
The Frontier supercomputer at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory earned the top ranking on May 30 2022, as the world’s fastest on the 59th TOP500 list, with 1.1 exaflops of performance. The system is the first to achieve the level of computing performance known as exascale, a threshold of a quintillion calculations per second.
Dawn is #9 on the June 2009 Top500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers. Kim Cupps, High Performance Systems Division leader, and Mark Seager, assistant department head for New Technologies at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, inspect a newly installed rack for Dawn, a 500 teraFLOP/s (trillion floating operations per second) IBM BlueGene/P system. Dawn will help lay the foundation for the 20 petaFLOP/s (quadrillion floating operations per second) Sequoia system. [More info] Photo by Jacqueline McBride/LLNL
"Guarda che ce l'ha quello con la giacca blu, l'ha appena messo nel taschino."
"Ma sei sicura? Hanno detto che era solo a livello sperimentale, che non si poteva ancora avere in commercio."
"Ce l'ha lui, l'ho visto, l'ho riconosciuto, l'ho visto in tv; quella forma oblunga, sembra una specie di biro, con alla fine due puntine di ferro."
"Giada, sei la mia cameriera da anni. E' vero che ti ho sempre trattata bene?"
Giada guardò il suo capo, un omone grande e grosso, che a volte le aveva fatto paura, specie all'inizio.
"Beppone, a volte mi hai un po' spaventata, agli inizi."
"Ma poi ti è passato vero? Ora non più?"
"Vero, ora non più, ho imparato a conoscerti, so che sei irascibile ma con me sempre buono."
Beppone tirò un sospiro di sollievo.
Era una comitiva di trentacinque persone e uno di loro poteva avere l'arnese.
Anche lui ne aveva sentito parlare, dell'arnese; sembrava impossibile che lo realizzassero, sembrava irraggiungibile; evidentemente con qualche diavoleria elettronica erano riusciti a costruirlo.
Ne aveva parlato con i suoi colleghi ristoratori; "Se lo producono è la fine", diceva qualcuno, altri invece dicevano "No, questo è l'inizio, ci voleva, ora vediamo chi sa lavorare."
Tutto era cominciato pochi mesi prima, molto lontano, negli eleganti tavoli dirigenziale di una mega-company statunitense, si parlava di una fusione importante.
Sul tavolo due soluzioni, una antitetica all'altra.
Una proposta da una donna, l'altra dall'uomo.
Aveva vinto la donna.
La fusione del secolo, l'avevano chiamata.
L'uomo non era abituato a perdere; la sua proposta era chiaramente economicamente migliore, come poteva aver vinto la donna? Quali armi aveva utilizzato?
Così, a decisioni prese, appena fuori dalla riunione, chiese ad uno degli azionisti cosa l'aveva fatto votare per lei.
"Vedi, è semplice. Guardala. Ha ragione, è chiara, spiega le cose bene, è luminosa; si vede che conosce la materia. Io non posso conoscere tutti i numeri; ma la direzione che ci ha indicato mi sembra buona. La tua era sicuramente corretta, tecnicamente, magari anche vantaggiosa; ma non 'sapeva di futuro'; le sue parole, invece, odoravano di sano, di possibilità".
Chiese ancora ad altri: stesse risposte, più o meno, una fiducia incondizonata in quella persona.
Decise di parlare alla donna; la trovò straordinariamente radiosa ed elegante, motivo in più per rimanerci male al rifiuto ad un invito a cena.
L'uomo aveva ormai una certa età ed aveva finito si essere caparbio; sapeva che prima o poi i nodi vengono al pettine e se ne andò a testa bassa.
Lo incrociò un collega dello staff avversario, con cui aveva lavorato anni addietro.
"Hey, che viso triste... non te la prendere, lo sai che capita."
"Si, vero, capita. Devo ritirarmi per meditarci un po' sopra."
"Meditarci? Andiamo a berci una birra, piuttosto."
"No... un'altra volta."
"Ok va bene, ma via quel muso... questa volta non potevi vincere."
L'uomo alzò il livello di attenzione.
"Come non potevo? Non sembrava buona la mia soluzione?"
"Si, certo, ma lei aveva un'arma che, evidentemente, tu non conosci."
"Cioè?"
Il collega rispose con un sorriso.
"Cioè? Non ho capito, spiega!"
Il collega capì di essere andato un po' oltre; ma l'uomo era un amico, ed il 'segreto' non era poi così tanto un segreto, la voce si stava diffondendo.
Così lo prese in disparte e i due si appartarono sul divanetto di un bar.
"Adesso mi spieghi cos'aveva."
"Beh... ti sembrerà una cosa stupida, per cui non te la prendere con me. E poi fai finta che non te l'abbia detto, siamo concorrenti."
"Va bene, parla."
"Lei è arrivata stamane dall'Europa."
Il collega aspettò per vedere segni di comprensione sul viso dell'amico.
"E allora?"
Proseguì, sperando che qualche voce gli fosse arrivata.
"Dalla Provenza; ieri era là."
"Mi stai prendendo in giro? Cosa c'entra?"
"Come, non sai proprio nulla?"
"Nulla di cosa?!?"
"Ha cenato alla Tavola di Viviana."
"La smetti di prendermi in giro? Cosa vuol dire? Cos'è questa tavola? Cosa c'entra con la fusione?"
"Vedo che proprio non t'è arrivata alcuna notizia in merito. La Tavola di Viviana è un ristorante, in Provenza, nella Francia del Sud. Sembra che le persone che pranzano lì per qualche tempo stiano molto bene, diventino quasi luminose, e nel parlare, nel consigliare del comunicare in genere diventano dolci, credibili, convincenti."
"Ma che stupidata!"
"Sì, una stupidata che ha fatto perdere al tuo cliente qualche milione di dollari."
La Tavola di Viviana era un ristorantino sulle colline della Provenza; la proprietaria, Viviana appunto, gestiva il locale aiutata da due ragazzotti, un maschio ed una femmina, ed un cuoco.
In una vita precedente Viviana aveva accumulato denaro; nessuno sapeva bene come.
Arrivata ai cinquanta decise di averne abbastanza e aprì questa locanda curandone l'arredamento, le forniture e, soprattutto, il personale.
Viviana aveva un modo di fare avvolgente; con chiunque parlasse sembrava prendersene cura, ben al di là delle circostanze.
Soprattutto i due ragazzi ed il cuoco ne erano coinvolti; si sentivano totalmente amati e rispettati da questa donna più anziana che procurava loro il lavoro e spesso si preoccupava anche delle loro esigenze extralavorative.
Non solo ne erano coinvolti; anche quando parlava con un fornitore, Viviana si preoccupava prima della persona, poi dei prodotti; tanto che molti uomini pensavano che li stesse filando, ma presto si accorgevano che le attenzioni non erano in quella direzione.
Così dopo qualche anno anche i fornitori diventarono amici, e passavano da Viviana anche oltre gli orari delle consegne.
I prodotti che portavano erano sempre i migliori a disposizione ed i più freschi.
Gli occhi calmi di Viviana, la bontà del cibo, l'allegria dei due ragazzi, il pacioso lavoro del cuoco fischiettante nella cucina a vista e la calma delle colline costituivano un ambiente tranquillo in cui molti volentieri si fermavano per un pranzo o una cena.
Certo in molti notarono l'effetto che quei pasti avevano sulle persone, ma solo dopo qualche tempo nacque la leggenda della locanda 'magica', cioè il posto dove nutrirsi per sentirsi meglio.
Nei periodi successivi ai pasti le persone stavano meglio, splendevano; tutti lo notavano, e questo splendore si rifletteva sulle rispettive famiglie e sugli ambienti di lavoro; non ci volle molto perchè tutti capissero come un pasto da Viviana fosse il toccasana nel caso si dovessero risolvere problemi o affrontare situazioni difficili; una specie di cura.
Lo stesso capitò alla donna della riunione di cui vi ho raccontato; cenò qui la sera ed il giorno dopo vinse la sua battaglia per la fusione.
Ora devo dirvi che sono Gerbero Vallanzani e faccio il ricercatore; sono quello con la giacca blu di cui avete letto all'inizio.
Non mi prendete in giro per il nome, a me piace.
Ma per spiegarvi cos'ho nel taschino, e perchè terrorizza l'oste che ho davanti, devo ancora dirvi un paio di cose.
Anch'io avevo sentito parlare di questa leggenda della Tavola di Viviana; vivevo da quelle parti e così, in una bella giornata d'agosto, mi sono seduto sotto le piante della locanda per pranzare.
Cibo senza grandi pretese, ma indubbiamente buono, ambiente cordiale, giornata tranquilla; a dire il vero, nulla di eccezionale oltre ad un diffuso senso di benessere.
Dopo il pranzo, quel giorno avevo lezione, spiegavo fisica atomica in istituto e... finita l'ora tutti i ragazzi sorridevano, addirittura qualcuno mi ha ringraziato per la chiarezza della spiegazione. Normalmente sono abbastanza noioso, lo so, nelle spiegazioni; quella volta invece mi sentii come il mago dei docenti.
Qualche parola con i colleghi.. l'effetto funzionava ancora! La sera a casa con la famiglia... magia! Riuscivo a parlare bene, chiaro, ad essere allegro e fiducioso, a parlare anche di sventure in modo risolutivo e conciliante.
Visto che sono ricercatore, ricerco.
Così sono tornato più volte alla Tavola di Viviana; e ho sperimentato che l'effetto 'magico' in effetti funzionava; a volte in modo più, marcato, a volte meno: ma funzionava.
Un giorno non ha funzionato.
Sono andato, ho pranzato, sono stato servito dalla ragazza un po' più corrucciata del solito e, al pomeriggio, nessun effetto.
Sono tornato il giorno dopo e c'era un cartello, 'siamo chiusi'.
Ho incrociato Viviana che stava uscendo, le ho chiesto il motivo.
Alla risposta che mi ha dato ho dapprima riso un po', poi, di fronte al suo viso serio, ho smesso.
"E morto il gatto della cameriera."
"Si.. certo.. ma se muore il gatto voi chiudete?"
"Si, volevo già chiudere ieri che stava male."
"Come? Chiudete il ristorante per un gatto malato?"
"Certo. Può un fiume 'restare aperto' se non ha acqua? Può un prato 'restare aperto' se non ha erba?"
"EH?"
L'ho guardata bene; aveva un po' gli occhi di una pazza.
Conosco bene quello sguardo.
Ho conosciuto centinaia di ricercatori di tutto il mondo, e conosco bene lo sguardo di chi ha visto oltre; lei aveva quegli occhi.
Ho abbassato i miei, come chi si arrende di fronte ad una potenza superiore.
E ho chiesto: mi dica, mi spieghi, sono un ricercatore.
"Ho aperto un distributore di felicità attraverso questo ristorante; i cibi sono estremamente ricettivi, se le persone che li preparano e li servono sono felici, questa felicità si moltiplica e passa nei cibi che a loro volta la portano ai miei clienti. Semplice. Gatto morto, ragazza infelice, gioco finito. Scusi devo andare."
"Ma aspetti!! Come! Come l'ha scoperto? Dove va? un attimo!"
"Ho passato una vita a dare felicità alle persone, e questo mi ha riempito la vita di gioia. Ho voluto inventare un metodo per darne di più di quella che posso regalare singolarmente. Col ristorante sono riuscita. Torni dopodomani, dopo i funerali riapriremo e le dirò di più."
Che donna! Incredibile! Che forza!
Che... roba impossibile, ma che dice, che vaneggia? Erogare felicità! Come fosse un distributore! Col cibo! Che baggianate!
Ma... e se fosse vero? La maggior parte delle scoperte scientifiche sono state fatte da chi ha smesso di credere alle certezze.
Così nei giorni successivi ho fatto il ricercatore della felicità; ho utilizzato metodi scientifici per cercare di trovare se la felicità fosse presente nei cibi.
Naturalmente non ne ho parlato con il mio capo, nè ho pensato di pubblicare i miei studi.. mi avrebbero tutti presi in giro.
Dal punto di vista scientifico qualcosa esiste se ha un effetto misurabile; sono partito da questo punto e ogni tanto prendevo qualche cibo dalla locanda e lo portavo in laboratorio, procurandomene un altro identico da confrontare. Sono riuscito anche ad averne qualcuno dallo stesso fornitore della locanda, proveniente dalle stesse origini.
Ho piantato un paio di elettrodi nei due cibi e ho provato a registrare le microcorrenti che potevano formarsi, oppure ad iniettare segnali a diversa frequenza e ampiezza d'onda, ma non ho avuto risultati.
Da qualche giorno abbiamo a disposizione in laboratorio potenze computazionali enormi, messe a disposizione da un progetto europeo; tramite rete, possiamo accedervi.
Le ho usate in questo modo: ho inviato nei cibi segnali di diversa fequenza e modulazione varianti per valori discreti ed incrociati in modo semicasuale e ho registrato eventuali microcorrenti che potessero generarsi in risposta.
Ho registrato dati per due giorni per mille variazioni al secondo, con tutte le possibili combinazioni che sono riuscito a generare.
Quindi ho impacchettatto il tutto in un set di dati elaborabile dai supercomputer.
Ho aspettato la tarda sera quindi ho messo insieme tutta la potenza che avevo a disposizione: 15000 CPU per 12 TeraFlops, gli ho dato in pasto il set di dati, l'ha elaborato per 25 secondi e mi ha dato la risposta.
La risposta era positiva: effettivamente poteva esistere una combinazione di segnali che iniettata stimolava nel cibo 'felice' una reazione diversa dal cibo 'campione'.
Quella notte l'ho passata in laboratorio.
Ho lavorato sui dati e scomposto la sequenza di frequenze 'discriminanti', quelle che davano risposte diverse nei due cibi.
Il segnale disriminante era composto da una dozzina di frequenze diverse nello spettro udibile.
Me lo appuntai su un foglio: sono 'una dozzina di frequenze diverse nello spettro udibile'.
Osservai il foglio e poi mi guardai allo specchio e mi misi a ridere; i ricercatori si perdono sempre in un bicchier d'acqua!
'Frequenze dello spettro udibile'!! Note, sono note!!! Note musicali, che scemo!!
Ne feci un file WAV musicale, indossai le cuffie e ancora un po' cadevo a terra dallo stupore a sentire quelle dodici frequenze
Mi sarei aspettato di tutto ma... "fra Martino campanaro!!!" com'era possibile?
Eppure... la prova sperimentale funzionava: iniettando nel cibo quella serie di frequenze quello 'felice' rispondeva, l'altro taceva.
Indagando, scoprri che in genere qualsiasi buona musica iniettata nelcibo 'felice' dava reazioni che non erano presenti nel cibo campione.
Avevo inventato il... misuratore di felicità nei cibi!
Da allora ho provato e riprovato: funziona.
Non c'è ancora uno sviluppo industriale, ma qualche testata giornalistica se n'è interessata; prima come scoop, ora più seriamente.
Ciò che è successo dopo, è stato incredibile.
Il misuratore è stato dapprima messo a disposizione per i laboratori di misura; il sistema di rilevamento delle microcorrenti è molto complesso e costoso e quindi solo i grandi laboratori potevano averlo.
Qualche albergatore, fiutato l'affare, ha voluto fare misurare i propri cibi; cibi che, in qualche caso, effettivamente rispondevano positivamente come 'contenenti felicità'.
A questo punto risultò facile a qualcuno pubblicizzare il proprio 'ristorante felice' ed avere molti clienti.
La situazione per questi ristoratori è oggi però totalmente precaria; è difficile avere del cibo felice perchè ci vogliono fornitori felici e personale felice, e basta un nonnulla per rovinare la catena della felicità; se, per esempio, una cassa di limoni pur biologici e naturali viene presa a calci dall'addetto di un magazzino, sarà quasi impossibile trasformarla in cibo felice, ed il succo contaminerà gli altri cibi.
Se un cameriere è sottopagato o trattato male, sarà impossibile che possa servire cibo felice; anzi, rischia di rovinare il cibo felice esistente.
In un primo tempo i 'ristoranti felici' erano carissimi; ma non sono sopravvissuti, non è solo un detto che 'il denaro non dà la felicità'; se n'è avuta dimostrazione.
Tutto il settore è in subbuglio; tutti i clienti vogliono cibo felice, e se i misuratori portatili diventeranno una realtà, ci si aspetta una rivoluzione nella modalità di somministrare alimenti.
Allo stesso tempo gestire un ristorante diventa una professione di una raffinatezza indicibile; non solo la capacità culinaria, ma psicologia e saggezza diventano doti necessarie.
Qualche ristoratore se la ride, e continua a fare affari perchè da sempre offre cibo felice; altri.. non ridono.
Ora sto testando il primo dispositivo portatile prodotto... e quindi capite perchè l'oste è così preoccupato... e perchè lo sguardo di Viviana mi è ancora così impresso nei ricordi.
[ la locanda La Table de Viviane esiste, è all'indirizzo riportato nella geolocalizzazione della foto]
New York Blue/L is an 18 rack IBM Blue Gene/L massively parallel supercomputer located at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in Upton, Long Island, New York. It is the centerpiece of the New York Center for Computational Sciences (NYCCS), a cooperative effort between BNL and Stony Brook University that will also involve universities throughout the state of New York. Each of the 18 racks consists of 1024 compute nodes (a total of 18432 nodes) with each node containing two 700 MHz PowerPC 440 core processors and 1 GB of memory (a total of 36864 processors and 18.4 TB of memory).
The Indy, code-named "Guinness", is a low-end workstation introduced on 12 July 1993. Developed and manufactured by Silicon Graphics Incorporated (SGI), it was the result of their attempt to obtain a share of the low-end computer-aided design (CAD) market, which was dominated at the time by other workstation vendors; and the desktop publishing and multimedia markets, which were mostly dominated at the time by Apple Computer. It was discontinued on 30 June 1997 and support ended on 31 December 2011.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Indy
Retrocomputing (a portmanteau of retro and computing) is the use of early computer hardware and software today. Retrocomputing is usually classed as a hobby and recreation rather than a practical application of technology; enthusiasts often collect rare and valuable hardware and software for sentimental reasons. However some do make use of it.[1] Retrocomputing often gets its start when a computer user realizes that expensive fantasy systems like IBM Mainframes, DEC Superminis, SGI workstations and Cray Supercomputers have become affordable on the used computer market, usually in a relatively short time after the computers' era of use.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrocomputing
Con il termine retrocomputing si indica una attività di "archeologia informatica" che consiste nel reperire, specialmente a costi minimi, computer di vecchie generazioni, che hanno rappresentato fasi importanti dell'evoluzione tecnologica, ripararli se sono danneggiati, metterli nuovamente in funzione e preservarli.
Arsenal (Vienna)
The Vienna Arsenal, object 1
(Pictures you can see by clicking on the link at the end of page!)
The Arsenal in Vienna is a former military complex in the southeast of the city, located in the 3rd district of Vienna. The mighty, consisting of several brick buildings facility is located on a rectangular plan on a hill south of the Country Road Belt (Landstraßer Gürtel).
Meaning
The Arsenal is the most important secular assembly of Romantic Historicism in Vienna and was conducted in Italian-Medieval and Byzantine-Moorish forms. Essentially the complex is preserved in its original forms; only the former workshop buildings within the bounding, from the the outside visible wings were replaced by new constructions.
History to 1945
Bird's eye view of the complex, arsenal, lithography Alexander Kaiser, 1855
Vienna Arsenal (Museum of Military History)
Arsenal, with HGM (Heeresgeschichtliches Museum) from the East
The complex, with a total of 31 "objects" (buildings) was built from 1849 to 1856 on the occasion of the March Revolution of 1848 and was the first building of the fortress triangle, replacing the old Vienna's city walls, with the Rossauer Barracks and the now-defunct Franz Joseph barracks at Stubenring. These buildings should not serve to deter foreign enemies from the city, but to secure state power in the event of revolutionary upheavals in Vienna. The decision to build the Arsenal, it came from the 19-year-old Emperor Franz Joseph I who on 2 December 1848 had come to the throne.
The design for the Imperial Artillery Arsenal came from General Artillery Director Vincenz Freiherr von Augustin, to which, subsequently, the site management had been transferred. Under his leadership, the buildings under assignment of sectors have been planned of the architects Carl Roesner, Antonius Pius de Riegel, August Sicard von Sicardsburg, Eduard van der Nüll, Theophil von Hansen and Ludwig Förster and built by the company of the architect Leopold Mayr.
From 1853 to 1856, Arsenal church was built by the architect Carl Roesner. The K.K. Court Weapon Museum, later K.K. Army Museum, now Museum of Military History, housed in a separate representative free-standing wing, was completed structurally in 1856, but was only in 1869 for the first time accessible.
For the construction of the Arsenal 177 million bricks were used. Construction costs totaled $ 8.5 million guilders. In the following years, there have been extensions. During the two world wars, the complex served as a weapons factory and arsenal, especially as barracks.
The record number of employees in Arsenal was reached in the First World War, with around 20,000 staffers. After 1918, the military-industrial operation with own steel mill was transformed into a public service institution with the name "Austrian Factories Arsenal". However, there were almost insoluble conversion problems in the transition to peacetime production, the product range was too great and the mismanagement considerable. The number of employees declined steadily, and the company became one of the great economic scandals of the First Republic.
By the fall of 1938, the area belonged to the 10th District Favoriten. However, as was established during the "Third Reich" the Reich District of Greater Vienna, became the arsenal complex and the south-east of it lying areas in the wake of district boundary changes parts of the 3rd District.
During the Second World War, in the Arsenal tank repair workshops of the Waffen-SS were set up. In the last two years of the war several buildings were severely damaged by bombing. During the Battle of Vienna, in the days of 7 to 9 April 1945, was the arsenal, defended by the 3rd SS Panzer Division "Totenkopf", focus of the fighting, the Red Army before its victory facing heavy losses.
History since 1945
Ruins of the object 15 after the air raids 1944
Deposits at the Arsenal Street
After heavy bomb damages during the Second World War, the buildings of the Arsenal were largely restored to their original forms.
In the southern part and in the former courtyard of the arsenal several new buildings were added, among them 1959-1963 the decoration workshops of the Federal Theatre designed by the architects Erich Boltenstern and Robert Weinlich. From 1961 to 1963, the telecommunications central office was built by the architect Fritz Pfeffer. From 1973 to 1975 were built operation and office building of the Post and Telephone Head Office for Vienna, Lower Austria and Burgenland (now Technology Centre Arsenal of Telekom Austria) with the 150-meter high radio tower in Vienna Arsenal according to the plans of architect Kurt Eckel. In the 1990s, a rehearsal stage of the Castle Theater (Burgtheater) was built according to plans by Gustav Peichl.
Also the Austrian Research and Testing Centre Arsenal, now Arsenal Research, which has made itself wordwide a celebrity by one of the largest air chambers (now moved to Floridsdorf - 21st District), was housed in the complex. A smaller part of the complex is still used by the Austrian army as a barracks. Furthermore, the Central Institute for Disinfection of the City of Vienna and the Central Chemical Laboratory of the Federal Monuments Office are housed in the arsenal. The Military History Museum uses multiple objects as depots.
In one part of the area residential buildings were erected. The Arsenal is forming an own, two census tracts encompassing census district, which according to the census in 2001 had 2.058 inhabitants.
End of 2003, the arsenal in connection with other properties of the Federal Property Society (BIG - Bundesimmobiliengesellschaft) was sold to a private investor group. Since early 2006, the lawyer of Baden (Lower Austria, not far away from Vienna) Rudolf Fries and industrialist Walter Scherb are majority owners of the 72,000 m2 historic site that they want to refurbish and according to possibility rent new. Fries also plans to enlarge the existing living space by more than a half (about 40,000 m2).
An architectural design competition, whose jury on 28 and 29 in June 2007 met, provided proposals amounting to substantial structural changes in the complex. Such designed competition winner Hohensinn a futuristic clouds clip modeled after El Lissitzky's cloud bracket, a multi-level horizontal structure on slender stilts over the old stock on the outskirts of the Swiss Garden. The realization of these plans is considered unlikely.
Some objects are since 2013 adapted for use by the Technical University of Vienna: Object 227, the so-called "Panzerhalle" will house laboratories of the Institute for Powertrains and Automotive Technology. In object 221, the "Siemens hall", laboratories of the Institute for Energy Technology and Thermodynamics as well as of the Institute for Manufacturing Technology and High Power Laser Technology are built. In object 214 is besides the Technical Testing and Research Institute (TVFA) also the second expansion stage of the "Vienna Scientific Cluster" housed, of a supercomputer, which was built jointly by the Vienna University of Technology, the University of Vienna and the University of Agricultural Sciences.
Accessibility
The arsenal was historically especially over the Landstraßer Gürtel developed. Today passes southeast in the immediate proximity the Südosttangente called motorway A23 with it connection Gürtel/Landstraßer Hauptstrasse. Southwest of the site runs the Eastern Railway, the new Vienna Central Station closes to the west of the arsenal. Two new bridges over the Eastern Railway, the Arsenal Stay Bridge and the Southern Railway bridge and an underpass as part of Ghegastraße and Alfred- Adler-Straße establish a connection to the on the other side of the railway facilities located Sonnwendviertel in the 10th District, which is being built on the former site of the freight train station Vienna South Station.
On the center side is between Arsenal and Landstraßer Gürtel the former Maria Josefa Park located, now known as Swiss Garden. Here stands at the Arsenal street the 21er Haus, a branch of the Austrian Gallery Belvedere, on the center-side edge of the Swiss Garden has the busy suburban main railway route the stop Vienna Quartier Belvedere, next to it the Wiener Linien D (tram) and 69A (bus) run.
Edited Event Horizon Telescope image of a black hole in the the galaxy M87. What you see here isn't the actual black hole but material tat has been heated to super-hot temperatures and glows as a result of being so close to the black hole and rubbing against other particles. Larger image to follow. Inverted grayscale variant.
Image source: eventhorizontelescope.org/
First original caption: Scientists have obtained the first image of a black hole, using Event Horizon Telescope observations of the center of the galaxy M87. The image shows a bright ring formed as light bends in the intense gravity around a black hole that is 6.5 billion times more massive than the Sun. This long-sought image provides the strongest evidence to date for the existence of supermassive black holes and opens a new window onto the study of black holes, their event horizons, and gravity. Credit: Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration
Second original caption: Astronomers Capture First Image of a Black Hole
An international collaboration presents paradigm-shifting observations of the gargantuan black hole at the heart of distant galaxy Messier 87
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) — a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes forged through international collaboration — was designed to capture images of a black hole. Today, in coordinated press conferences across the globe, EHT researchers reveal that they have succeeded, unveiling the first direct visual evidence of a supermassive black hole and its shadow.
This breakthrough was announced today in a series of six papers published in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The image reveals the black hole at the center of Messier 87 [1], a massive galaxy in the nearby Virgo galaxy cluster. This black hole resides 55 million light-years from Earth and has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the Sun [2].
The EHT links telescopes around the globe to form an Earth-sized virtual telescope with unprecedented sensitivity and resolution [3]. The EHT is the result of years of international collaboration, and offers scientists a new way to study the most extreme objects in the Universe predicted by Einstein’s general relativity during the centennial year of the historic experiment that first confirmed the theory [4].
"We have taken the first picture of a black hole," said EHT project director Sheperd S. Doeleman of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. "This is an extraordinary scientific feat accomplished by a team of more than 200 researchers."
Black holes are extraordinary cosmic objects with enormous masses but extremely compact sizes. The presence of these objects affects their environment in extreme ways, warping spacetime and super-heating any surrounding material.
"If immersed in a bright region, like a disc of glowing gas, we expect a black hole to create a dark region similar to a shadow — something predicted by Einstein’s general relativity that we’ve never seen before, explained chair of the EHT Science Council Heino Falcke of Radboud University, the Netherlands. "This shadow, caused by the gravitational bending and capture of light by the event horizon, reveals a lot about the nature of these fascinating objects and allowed us to measure the enormous mass of M87’s black hole."
Multiple calibration and imaging methods have revealed a ring-like structure with a dark central region — the black hole’s shadow — that persisted over multiple independent EHT observations.
"Once we were sure we had imaged the shadow, we could compare our observations to extensive computer models that include the physics of warped space, superheated matter and strong magnetic fields. Many of the features of the observed image match our theoretical understanding surprisingly well," remarks Paul T.P. Ho, EHT Board member and Director of the East Asian Observatory [5]. "This makes us confident about the interpretation of our observations, including our estimation of the black hole’s mass."
Creating the EHT was a formidable challenge which required upgrading and connecting a worldwide network of eight pre-existing telescopes deployed at a variety of challenging high-altitude sites. These locations included volcanoes in Hawai`i and Mexico, mountains in Arizona and the Spanish Sierra Nevada, the Chilean Atacama Desert, and Antarctica.
The EHT observations use a technique called very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI) which synchronises telescope facilities around the world and exploits the rotation of our planet to form one huge, Earth-size telescope observing at a wavelength of 1.3 mm. VLBI allows the EHT to achieve an angular resolution of 20 micro-arcseconds — enough to read a newspaper in New York from a sidewalk café in Paris [6].
The telescopes contributing to this result were ALMA, APEX, the IRAM 30-meter telescope, the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, the Large Millimeter Telescope Alfonso Serrano, the Submillimeter Array, the Submillimeter Telescope, and the South Pole Telescope [7]. Petabytes of raw data from the telescopes were combined by highly specialised supercomputers hosted by the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy and MIT Haystack Observatory.
The construction of the EHT and the observations announced today represent the culmination of decades of observational, technical, and theoretical work. This example of global teamwork required close collaboration by researchers from around the world. Thirteen partner institutions worked together to create the EHT, using both pre-existing infrastructure and support from a variety of agencies. Key funding was provided by the US National Science Foundation (NSF), the EU's European Research Council (ERC), and funding agencies in East Asia.
"We have achieved something presumed to be impossible just a generation ago," concluded Doeleman. "Breakthroughs in technology, connections between the world's best radio observatories, and innovative algorithms all came together to open an entirely new window on black holes and the event horizon."
Notes
[1] The shadow of a black hole is the closest we can come to an image of the black hole itself, a completely dark object from which light cannot escape. The black hole’s boundary — the event horizon from which the EHT takes its name — is around 2.5 times smaller than the shadow it casts and measures just under 40 billion km across.
[2] Supermassive black holes are relatively tiny astronomical objects — which has made them impossible to directly observe until now. As a black hole’s size is proportional to its mass, the more massive a black hole, the larger the shadow. Thanks to its enormous mass and relative proximity, M87’s black hole was predicted to be one of the largest viewable from Earth — making it a perfect target for the EHT.
[3] Although the telescopes are not physically connected, they are able to synchronize their recorded data with atomic clocks — hydrogen masers — which precisely time their observations. These observations were collected at a wavelength of 1.3 mm during a 2017 global campaign. Each telescope of the EHT produced enormous amounts of data — roughly 350 terabytes per day — which was stored on high-performance helium-filled hard drives. These data were flown to highly specialised supercomputers — known as correlators — at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy and MIT Haystack Observatory to be combined. They were then painstakingly converted into an image using novel computational tools developed by the collaboration.
[4] 100 years ago, two expeditions set out for the island of Príncipe off the coast of Africa and Sobra in Brazil to observe the 1919 solar eclipse, with the goal of testing general relativity by seeing if starlight would be bent around the limb of the sun, as predicted by Einstein. In an echo of those observations, the EHT has sent team members to some of the world's highest and isolated radio facilities to once again test our understanding of gravity.
[5] The East Asian Observatory (EAO) partner on the EHT project represents the participation of many regions in Asia, including China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, India and Indonesia.
[6] Future EHT observations will see substantially increased sensitivity with the participation of the IRAM NOEMA Observatory, the Greenland Telescope and the Kitt Peak Telescope.
[7] ALMA is a partnership of the European Southern Observatory (ESO; Europe, representing its member states), the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), and the National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS) of Japan, together with the National Research Council (Canada), the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST; Taiwan), Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics (ASIAA; Taiwan), and Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI; Republic of Korea), in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. APEX is operated by ESO, the 30-meter telescope is operated by IRAM (the IRAM Partner Organizations are MPG (Germany), CNRS (France) and IGN (Spain)), the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope is operated by the EAO, the Large Millimeter Telescope Alfonso Serrano is operated by INAOE and UMass, the Submillimeter Array is operated by SAO and ASIAA and the Submillimeter Telescope is operated by the Arizona Radio Observatory (ARO). The South Pole Telescope is operated by the University of Chicago with specialized EHT instrumentation provided by the University of Arizona.
More Information
This research was presented in a series of six papers published today in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters, along with a Focus Issue:
Paper I: The Shadow of the Supermassive Black Hole
Paper II: Array and Instrumentation
Paper III: Data processing and Calibration
Paper IV: Imaging the Central Supermassive Black Hole
Paper V: Physical Origin of the Asymmetric Ring
Paper VI: The Shadow and Mass of the Central Black Hole
Press release images in higher resolution (4000x2330 pixels) can be found here in PNG (16-bit), and JPG (8-bit) format. The highest-quality image (7416x4320 pixels, TIF, 16-bit, 180 Mb) can be obtained from repositories of our partners, NSF and ESO. A summary of latest press and media resources can be found on this page.
The EHT collaboration involves more than 200 researchers from Africa, Asia, Europe, North and South America. The international collaboration is working to capture the most detailed black hole images ever by creating a virtual Earth-sized telescope. Supported by considerable international investment, the EHT links existing telescopes using novel systems — creating a fundamentally new instrument with the highest angular resolving power that has yet been achieved.
The individual telescopes involved are; ALMA, APEX, the IRAM 30-meter Telescope, the IRAM NOEMA Observatory, the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT), the Large Millimeter Telescope Alfonso Serrano (LMT), the Submillimeter Array (SMA), the Submillimeter Telescope (SMT), the South Pole Telescope (SPT), the Kitt Peak Telescope, and the Greenland Telescope (GLT).
The EHT collaboration consists of 13 stakeholder institutes; the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, the University of Arizona, the University of Chicago, the East Asian Observatory, Goethe-Universitaet Frankfurt, Institut de Radioastronomie Millimétrique, Large Millimeter Telescope, Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, MIT Haystack Observatory, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Radboud University and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.
Contact Information
Sheperd S. Doeleman
EHT Collaboration Director
Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian
60 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
E-mail: sdoeleman@cfa.harvard.edu
Phone: +1-617-496-7762
Peter D. Edmonds
Public Information Officer
Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian
60 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
E-mail: pedmonds@cfa.harvard.edu
Phone: +1-617-571-7279
EHT Outreach Working Group
E-mail: ehtelescope@gmail.com
The Apple IIc, the fourth model in the Apple II series of personal computers, was Apple Computer’s first endeavor to produce a portable computer. The end result was a luggable 7.5 lb (3.4 kg) notebook-sized version of the Apple II that could easily be transported from place to place.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_IIc
Retrocomputing (a portmanteau of retro and computing) is the use of early computer hardware and software today. Retrocomputing is usually classed as a hobby and recreation rather than a practical application of technology; enthusiasts often collect rare and valuable hardware and software for sentimental reasons. However some do make use of it.[1] Retrocomputing often gets its start when a computer user realizes that expensive fantasy systems like IBM Mainframes, DEC Superminis, SGI workstations and Cray Supercomputers have become affordable on the used computer market, usually in a relatively short time after the computers' era of use.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrocomputing
Con il termine retrocomputing si indica una attività di "archeologia informatica" che consiste nel reperire, specialmente a costi minimi, computer di vecchie generazioni, che hanno rappresentato fasi importanti dell'evoluzione tecnologica, ripararli se sono danneggiati, metterli nuovamente in funzione e preservarli.
Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything (42). In the first novel and radio series, a group of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings demand to learn the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything from the supercomputer, Deep Thought, specially built for this purpose. It takes Deep Thought 7½ million years to compute and check the answer, which turns out to be 42. The Ultimate Question itself is unknown. When asked to produce The Ultimate Question, Deep Thought says that it cannot; however, it can help to design an even more powerful computer, the Earth, that can. The programmers then embark on a further ten-million-year program to discover The Ultimate Question. This new computer will incorporate living beings in the "computational matrix", with the pan-dimensional creators assuming the form of mice. The process is hindered after eight million years by the unexpected arrival on Earth of the Golgafrinchans and then is ruined completely, five minutes before completion, when the Earth is destroyed by the Vogons to make way for a new Hyperspace Bypass. This is later revealed to have been a ruse: the Vogons had been hired to destroy the Earth by a consortium of psychiatrists, led by Gag Halfrunt, who feared for the loss of their careers when the meaning of life became known. Lacking a real question, the mice decide not to go through the whole thing again and settle for the out-of-thin-air suggestion "How many roads must a man walk down?" from Bob Dylan's song "Blowin' in the Wind". At the end of the radio series (and television series, as well as the novel The Restaurant at the End of the Universe) Arthur Dent, having escaped the Earth's destruction, potentially has some of the computational matrix in his brain. He attempts to discover The Ultimate Question by extracting it from his brainwave patterns, as abusively suggested by Ford Prefect, when a Scrabble-playing caveman spells out forty two. Arthur pulls random letters from a bag, but only gets the sentence "What do you get if you multiply six by nine?" "Six by nine. Forty two." "That's it. That's all there is." "I always thought something was fundamentally wrong with the universe" Six times nine is, of course, fifty-four. The program on the "Earth computer" should have run correctly, but the unexpected arrival of the Golgafrinchans on prehistoric Earth caused input errors into the system—computing (because of the garbage in, garbage out rule) the wrong question—the question in Arthur's subconscious being invalid all along. Quoting Fit the Seventh of the radio series, on Christmas Eve, 1978: Narrator: There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened. Some readers subsequently noticed that 613 × 913 = 4213 (using base 13). Douglas Adams later joked about this observation, saying, "I may be a sorry case, but I don't write jokes in base 13." In Life, the Universe and Everything, Prak, a man who knows all that is true, confirms that 42 is indeed The Answer, and confirms that it is impossible for both The Answer and The Question to be known about in the same universe (compare the uncertainty principle) as they will cancel each other out and take the Universe with them to be replaced by something even more bizarre (as described in the first theory) and that it may have already happened (as described in the second). Though the question is never found, 42 is shown as the table number at which Arthur and his friends sit when they arrive at Milliways at the end of the radio series. Likewise, Mostly Harmless ends when Arthur stops at a street address identified by his cry of, "There, number 42!" and enters the club Beta, owned by Stavro Mueller (Stavromula Beta). Shortly after, the earth is destroyed in all existing incarnations. The number 42 Douglas Adams was asked many times why he chose the number 42. Many theories were proposed, including the fact that 42 is 101010 in binary code, the fact that light refracts off water by 42 degrees to create a rainbow, the fact that light requires 10−42 seconds to cross the diameter of a proton. Adams rejected them all. On November 3, 1993, he gave an answer on alt.fan.douglas-adams: The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought '42 will do'. I typed it out. End of story. Adams described his choice as 'a completely ordinary number, a number not just divisible by two but also six and seven. In fact it's the sort of number that you could without any fear introduce to your parents'. While 42 was a number with no hidden meaning, Adams explained in more detail in an interview with Iain Johnstone of BBC Radio 4 (recorded in 1998 though never broadcast) to celebrate the first radio broadcast's 20th anniversary. Having decided it should be a number, he tried to think what an "ordinary number" should be. He ruled out non-integers, then he remembered having worked as a "prop-borrower" for John Cleese on his Video Arts training videos. Cleese needed a funny number for the punchline to a sketch involving a bank teller (himself) and a customer (Tim Brooke-Taylor). Adams believed that the number that Cleese came up with was 42 and he decided to use it. Adams also had written a sketch for The Burkiss Way called "42 Logical Positivism Avenue", broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 12 January 1977[10] – 14 months before the Hitchhiker's Guide first broadcast "42" in fit the fourth, 29 March 1978. In January 2000, in response to a panelist's "Where does the number 42 come from?" on the radio show "Book Club" Adams explained that he was "on his way to work one morning, whilst still writing the scene, and was thinking about what the actual answer should be. He eventually decided that it should be something that made no sense whatsoever- a number, and a mundane one at that. And that is how he arrived at the number 42, completely at random." Stephen Fry, a friend of Adams, claims that Adams told him "exactly why 42", and that the reason is "fascinating, extraordinary and, when you think hard about it, completely obvious." However, Fry says that he has vowed not to tell anyone the secret, and that it must go with him to the grave. John Lloyd, Adams' collaborator on The Meaning of Liff and two Hitchhiker's fits, said that Douglas has called 42 "the funniest of the two-digit numbers." The number 42 also appears frequently in the work of Lewis Carroll, and some critics have suggested that this was an influence. Other purported Carroll influences include that Adams named the episodes of the original radio series of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy "fits", the word Carroll used to name the chapters of The Hunting of the Snark. There is the persistent tale that forty-two is actually Adams' tribute to the indefatigable paperback book, and is really the average number of lines on an average page of an average paperback book. On the Internet The number 42 and the phrase, "Life, the universe, and everything" have attained cult status on the Internet. "Life, the Universe, and Everything" is a common name for the off-topic section of an Internet forum and the phrase is invoked in similar ways to mean "anything at all". Many chatbots, when asked about the meaning of life, will answer "42". Several online calculators are also programmed with the Question. If you type the answer to life the universe and everything into Google (without quotes or capitalising the small words), the Google Calculator will give you 42, as will Wolfram's Computational Knowledge Engine. Similarly, if you type the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything into DuckDuckGo, the 0-click box will read "42".[19] In the online community Second Life, there is a section on a sim called "42nd Life." It is devoted to this concept in the book series, and several attempts at recreating Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, were made. In the OpenOffice.org software, if you type into any cell of a spreadsheet =ANTWORT("Das Leben, das Universum und der ganze Rest"), which means the answer to life, the universe and everything, the result is 42.[20] ISO/IEC 14519-2001/ IEEE Std 1003.5-1999, IEEE Standard for Information Technology - POSIX(R) Ada Language Interfaces - Part 1: Binding for System Application Program Interface (API) , uses the number '42' as the required return value from a process that terminates due to an unhandled exception. The Rationale says "the choice of the value 42 is arbitrary" and cites the Adams book as the source of the value. The random seed chosen to procedurally create the whole universe including all the regions, constellations, stars, planets, moons and mineral distribution of the online massively multi-player computer game EVE Online was chosen as 42 by its lead game designer in 2002. Cultural references The Allen Telescope Array, a radio telescope used by SETI, has 42 dishes in homage to the Answer. In the TV show Lost, 42 is the last of the mysterious numbers, 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, and 42. In an interview with Lostpedia, producer David Fury confirmed this was a reference to Hitchhiker's. The TV show The Kumars at No. 42 is so named because show creator Sanjeev Bhaskar is a Hitchhiker's fan.[24] The band Coldplay's album Viva la Vida includes a song called "42". When asked by Q magazine if the song's title was Hitchhiker's-related, Chris Martin said, "It is and it isn't." The band Level 42 chose its name in reference to the book. The episode "42" of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who was named in reference to the Answer. Writer Chris Chibnall acknowledged that "it's a playful title". Ken Jennings, defeated along with Brad Rutter in a Jeopardy match against IBM's Watson, writes that Watson's avatar which appeared on-screen for those games showed 42 "threads of thought," and that the number was chosen in reference to this meme. by Jeff Ferguson
When the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility’s (OLCF’s) newest supercomputer, Summit, comes on line in 2018 at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), the system is expected to be one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world and one of the best machines for scientific computing and artificial intelligence applications.
At five to 10 times the computing power of OLCF’s current 27-petaflop Titan system, Summit’s leap in performance cannot be purchased out of the box. To meet specific performance, reliability, and efficiency requirements, OLCF staff collaborated with vendors IBM, NVIDIA, and Mellanox and CORAL partners Lawrence Livermore and Argonne National Laboratories to engineer Summit’s unique scientific computing environment, including customizations for software and hardware.
Known as nonrecurring engineering (NRE)—a one-time phase of R&D—this critical step in building Summit is steered for OLCF by Sudharshan Vazhkudai, Technology Integration (TechInt) Group leader, and Al Geist, OLCF Chief Technology Officer.
+ Read more: www.olcf.ornl.gov/2018/02/27/faces-of-summit-building-a-b...
This is one of three "Pegasus" computers sitting on my desk at the moment. The "Pegasus" computer was mentioned yesterday in Jonathan's blog and forms the processing building blocks for what will be the largest and fastest supercomputer in the world, the 500 teraflop "Ranger" computer at Texas Advanced Computing Center in Austin, TX.
We're wiring up 4000 of these puppies together for some seriously high-powered compute capability.
Unlike the PowerPC-based IBM BlueGene Supercomputer (with 131,000 processors!), the Pegasus runs Windows! TACC will use a Linux distribution. Solaris also works well on this, as does VMware's ESX software.
BLACK-HOLE COLLISIONS – Researchers used the Globus Toolkit, an open-source software toolkit partly developed by computer scientists at Argonne National Laboratory, to harness the power of multiple supercomputers to simulate the gravitational effects of black-hole collisions. The team, which included researchers from Argonne, the University of Chicago, Northern Illinois University and the Max Planck institute for Gravitational Physics in Germany, was awarded a prestigious Gordon Bell prize for its work.
Image courtesy of Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics.
The Frontier supercomputer at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory earned the top ranking on May 30 2022, as the world’s fastest on the 59th TOP500 list, with 1.1 exaflops of performance. The system is the first to achieve the level of computing performance known as exascale, a threshold of a quintillion calculations per second.
The Cray Y-MP/832 supercomputer was installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in February 1989; acceptance testing was completed in April. About 20 times faster than a Cray 1, the new Cray Y MP/832 was the fastest supercomputer available at the time on some benchmark tests. The system used the Lab’s New Network Livermore Time Sharing System as its standard operating system.
The Cray Y-MP 832 super computer was installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in February 1989; acceptance testing was completed in April. About 20 times faster than a Cray 1, the new YMP-832 was the fastest supercomputer available at the time on some benchmark tests. The system used the Lab’s New Network Livermore Time Sharing System as its standard operating system.
In 1988, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory installed the first totally new supercomputer operating system in 20 years on the Livermore Computer Center’s (LCC) Cray X/MP/48. The new Network Livermore Timesharing System (NLTSS) replaced the old Livermore Timesharing System. Nearly five years in design and four years in implementation, NLTSS was a state-of-the-art distributed processing system, providing more efficient use both of the center’s powerful multiprocessor supercomputers and the researcher’s own enhanced workstation.
The Apple IIc, the fourth model in the Apple II series of personal computers, was Apple Computer’s first endeavor to produce a portable computer. The end result was a luggable 7.5 lb (3.4 kg) notebook-sized version of the Apple II that could easily be transported from place to place.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_IIc
Retrocomputing (a portmanteau of retro and computing) is the use of early computer hardware and software today. Retrocomputing is usually classed as a hobby and recreation rather than a practical application of technology; enthusiasts often collect rare and valuable hardware and software for sentimental reasons. However some do make use of it.[1] Retrocomputing often gets its start when a computer user realizes that expensive fantasy systems like IBM Mainframes, DEC Superminis, SGI workstations and Cray Supercomputers have become affordable on the used computer market, usually in a relatively short time after the computers' era of use.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrocomputing
Con il termine retrocomputing si indica una attività di "archeologia informatica" che consiste nel reperire, specialmente a costi minimi, computer di vecchie generazioni, che hanno rappresentato fasi importanti dell'evoluzione tecnologica, ripararli se sono danneggiati, metterli nuovamente in funzione e preservarli.
The NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) Data Exploration Theater features a 17- by 6-foot multi-screen visualization wall for engaging visitors and scientists with high-definition movies of simulation results. Here, the wall displays a 3.5-kilometer-resolution global simulation that captures numerous cloud types at groundbreaking fidelity. Credit: NASA/Pat Izzo To learn more about NCCS go to: www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/climate-sim-center.html ( www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/climate-sim-center.html ) NASA Goddard Space Flight Center is home to the nation's largest organization of combined scientists, engineers and technologists that build spacecraft, instruments and new technology to study the Earth, the sun, our solar system, and the universe.