IBM 'Roadrunner' Holds World's Fastest Computer Crown

IBM (NYSE: IBM)'s Roadrunner supercomputer at the Los Alamos National Laboratory held on to its title as the world's fastest computer, followed once again by Cray's Jaguar.

The biannual Top500 list, released Tuesday at the 2009 International Supercomputing Conference, also saw two new systems enter the top 10. Both systems -- the IBM BlueGene/P called Jugene and the Juropa, which is built from Novascale and Sun Microsystems Sun Blade x6048 server -- were at Forschungszentrum Juelich in Germany. The Jugene achieved 825.5 teraflops and the Juropa 274.8 teraflops. A teraflop is a trillion floating point operations per second.

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New Washing Machine Uses Plastic Instead of Water

Xeros is working on a new breed of washing machines that will use only a cup of water per load, relying on reusable nylon beads to trap dirt and stains for hundreds of washes.

The U.K.-based Xeros has been testing the machine for three years. Through a partnership with GreenEarth Cleaning, the machines will soon be sold in North America. The initial target will be commercial dry cleaners and laundromats.

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Altierre Sees Opportunity for Temperature Tags

Altierre, a San Jose, Calif., provider of wireless solutions for retailers, has released a new temperature-sensing product designed to help stores monitor the conditions under which food is stored or displayed. The system can be installed in a matter of hours, with a typical cost to a supermarket of approximately $15,000, including software, sensor tags and interrogators. Alternatively, it can be added to an Altierre wireless shelf tag system already installed, by simply deploying the sensor tags, priced at less than $10 apiece.

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Telstra, Salmat give voice to NAB biometric security system

The new speech security service enables customers calling NAB’s customer contact centre to register their voice pattern and use this for authentication on subsequent calls, enhancing security and removing the need for customers to remember PINs and passwords.

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Telstra, Salmat give voice to NAB biometric security system

The new speech security service enables customers calling NAB’s customer contact centre to register their voice pattern and use this for authentication on subsequent calls, enhancing security and removing the need for customers to remember PINs and passwords.

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Progress on Making Fuel Cells a Commercial Possibility

The high cost of manufacturing fuel cells makes their large-scale production for power generation next to impossible, but researchers at Arizona State University are working to change that so cars, electricity and much more can run on the “green” technology.

Engineering technology professor Arunachalanadar Madakannan (Kannan) has been studying the proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFC) for more than eight years. The fuel cells Kannan and his graduate students are focusing on employ carbon nanotube-based catalysts and electrodes.

Fuels cells, which cleanly and quietly generate electric power by passing fuels like hydrogen over one electrode while passing air over a second electrode, have been around for more than 100 years. But their development has long been dogged by costs of the technology as well as safety concerns.

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Lockheed Martin has successful DAGR test

Lockheed Martin announced it has successfully tested a next-generation rocket technology at the U.S. Army Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona.

Lockheed Martin successfully conducted a test of its DAGR rocket system demonstrating the technology's target acquisition capabilities during night and daylight environmental conditions.

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Google: We’ve Made a Breakthrough in Image Search

The search giant Monday presented a paper on landmark recognition at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) conference in Miami. The new technology allows computers to quickly I.D. images of more than 50,000 world landmarks with 80-percent accuracy, Google says.

Google is quick to point out its pattern-recognition technology is still a research project and not a new service. That makes sense, as a search tool that's right just 8 out of 10 tries isn't ready for prime time.

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HP Touchscreen Printer Will Connect to the Web

Hewlett-Packard will release an inkjet printer later this year that will let users print documents from the Internet without a PC, the company said Monday.

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Trans-Atlantic Internet Cables May Be Filled by 2014

Voracious Web surfers, e-mailers and downloaders will use up the trans-Atlantic cables that were overbuilt early in this decade within the next five years, forcing carriers to invest in new ones in a market that's become used to adding bandwidth cheaply, according to research company Telegeography.

The telecommunications boom spawned so much new data capacity on fiber-optic cables across the Atlantic that the market has seen a supply glut and low prices for years, Telegeography said in a report released Monday. That has reduced the financial incentive for carriers to invest in new cables, but they may have to do so by 2014, said Telegeography analyst Erik Kreifeldt.

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Private Companies Claim Better, Cheaper Options for New NASA Rocket

Executives from several private space companies said Wednesday that they could provide cheaper, more reliable launch systems than those of NASA's Constellation program.

The executives made their comments about alternatives to NASA's plan for sending astronauts to the moon and on to Mars during the first meeting of the Review of U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee created by President Barack Obama.

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IAI Introduces New Medium Laser Guided Weapon

AI/MBT is unveiling here the MLGB, - Medium Laser Guided Bomb, offering dual-mode guidance employing GPS and terminal laser guidance. The weapon comprising an 80 kg warhead offers pinpoint accuracy under all weather conditions. The MLGB kit employs the warhead, terminal seeker and guidance system, attached to a wing assembly that retracts after release.

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Russian Sukhoi Reinforces Domestic Military Platform

While Russia's military elite have already seen the prototype - or perhaps prototypes - of the air force's nextgeneration heavy fighter, the aircraft will likely only make its public debut after first flight, if tradition is followed.

Senior Russian government and military leaders continue to insist first flight will be this year. Up to three prototypes are thought to be in various stages of final assembly at the Sukhoi manufacturing site in Komsomolsk-on-Amur.

The Russian air force's fighter fleet replacement strategy in the near to medium term is built around two Sukhoi programs: the Su-27SM2 (Su-35) development of the Flanker and the T-50 design to meet its fifth-generation fighter project, known as PAK FA.

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Drinking Water in Action…Bottles or Pouches?

Providing reliable drinking water to teams in action in theatre and in the field time and time again is a top notch logistic performance.

The new way to perform at the right level is to organize on site production and distribution rather than rely on vulnerable long distance transport.

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Citrix To Boost US Army's Satellite Communications Capabilities

Citrix Systems has announced that the company's Government Systems team has partnered with TeleCommunication Systems (TCS) on its Secure Internet Protocol Router (SIPR) Non-secure Internet Protocol Router (NIPR) Access Point (SNAP) program for the U.S. Army.


Specifically, Citrix WANScaler technologies are integrated into TCS SNAP Network Packages which support ongoing military operations in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

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Boeing Team Completes Segment Testing Of SBSS

Boeing has successfully completed integration and testing of the space segment, as well as initial testing of the ground segments, of the Space Based Space Surveillance (SBSS) system under development for the U.S. Air Force. Completion of these milestones confirms that the space vehicle and ground segments meet requirements for the first SBSS mission.

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JHSV Fast Catamaran Transport Program Moves Forward

These Australian-designed ships give commanders the ability to roll on a company with full gear and equipment (or roll on a full infantry battalion if used only as a troop transport), haul it intra-theater distances at 38 knots, then move their shallow draft safely into austere ports to roll them off. Unsurprisingly, their use has attracted favorable comment and notice from the US Navy, Marines, and Army alike.

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Can DARPA Teach Machines to Read?

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has launched the Machine Reading program to develop a revolutionary, automated reading system that bridges the gap between naturally occurring text and the artificial intelligence (AI) reasoning systems that need such knowledge.

AI systems continue to grow in use by the US military as there is a consistent emphasis on using high technology as a strategic advantage and reducing reliance on humans. DID has more on the military applications of AI.

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First floating wind turbine buoyed off Norway

Development of offshore wind farms has been restricted to places where turbines can be attached to the sea bed.

But earlier this week, Siemens and energy company StatoilHydro installed what they call the first large-scale floating turbine. The installation is off the coast of Norway, and testing is expected to last for two years.

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Laser Projector delivers 3D images at 4K x 4K resolution

Evans & Sutherland Computer Corporation (www.es.com) (E&S) (NASDAQ:ESCC) announced today it will demonstrate for the first time its revolutionary new 3D capable laser projection system at the InfoComm 2009 tradeshow, booth 3813, June 17-19 in Orlando, Florida. This newest E&S Laser Projector (the ESLP(TM) 8K) is the world's highest resolution production video projector, and it provides superior 3D images at an astounding 4K x 4K resolution. It will offer museums, universities, research labs, control rooms, creative studios and indoor venues worldwide with a 3D experience that brings viewers into worlds both real and imaginary in a way that they have never experienced before.

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Mine's eye

A UK company has developed real-time sonar-imaging technology that uses a computer graphics card to greatly improve the image quality for side-scan sonar, as used in mine-hunting and pipeline surveys.

Synthetic aperture sonar (SAS) techniques enhance the resolution of images processed from sideways-looking sonar by up to 10 times, but existing systems require expensive technology to estimate the motion of the platform, as well as requiring it to move relatively straight. University College London (UCL) spinout Bloomsbury DSP is using the processing power of an NVIDIA graphics card to run proprietary algorithms to deliver high-resolution sonar images in real time without these restrictions.

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Harris launches new receiver technology

U.S. company Harris Corp. announced the launch of its new hand-held intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance video receiver technology.

Harris, a communications and information solutions developer, introduced its new RF-7800T ISR Video Receiver. The handheld RF-7800T receiver is designed to provide soldiers with a next-generation tactical video technology supporting intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.

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Advanced tactical laser aircraft fires high-power laser in flight

Members of the 413th Flight Test Squadron, Hurlburt Field, Fla., and contractor Boeing recently successfully fired the high-power laser aboard the Advanced Tactical Laser aircraft for the first time in flight.

The combined effort between Boeing and the 413th was instrumental to the "first light" of the high power ATL.

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Lockheed Martin JSF Sales Could Reach 6,000

A chief official involved in the F-35 aircraft programme has forecast the prospect of Joint Strike Fighter sales reaching the 6,000 mark, which would put the new technologically-advanced multi-role type up there among the most-produced combat jets in history.

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GPS Device + Web Access = Never Get Lost Again

Web access is popping up in everything. If you make a product and don't offer access to the intertubes, you might as well toss it in a black hole and let it get crushed into a state of infinite mass and density. GPS makers have bought into this mindset and now haphazardly toss web browsers into their products, whether they need them or not.

TomTom's Go Live 740 is a new breed of web-ready GPS in which web access seems like a well-integrated enhancement, not a useless afterthought.

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NetWitness Launches Insight Solution for IT Risk Discovery and Remediation

NetWitness Corporation, the provider of the award-winning NextGen network security solution, today announced the availability of NetWitness InSight, an innovative solution for automated risk discovery and remediation for workstations and servers. NetWitness InSight improves upon current risk assessment methodologies by both discovering sensitive data on host systems across the enterprise and concurrently evaluating the security condition of each system.

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Human-Powered Subs Start Your 'Engines'

A group of budding engineers will be diving, splashing and swimming in the pool next week for the first time this summer. The difference between them and a lot of other high school and college students is the pool: an in-ground, freshwater basin that is about 3,000 feet (914.4 meters) long, 51 feet (15.5 meters) wide, and 22 feet (6.7 meters) deep at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Bethesda, Md. The occasion is this year's International Human-Powered Submarine Race.

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Unproven Missile Shield System Sent To Hawaii, Countering Potential North Korean Threat

Rumblings from Pyongyang regarding a long-rage missile test prompt deployment of an experimental missile shield and radar system

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Raytheon's C-RAM system testing grinds to a halt

Raytheon's work on a laser-based Phalanx counter-rocket and mortar (C-RAM) system has ground to a halt because the 50 kW fibre laser the company had borrowed for field tests has had to be returned to its owner.

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$27M to Harris for DISA Multinational Information Sharing Network

Harris Corp received a potential 5-year, $27 million contract from EDS to provide network and systems engineering and other support services for the Defense Information Systems Agency’s Multinational Information Sharing (MNIS) Program Management Office. Harris is the sole subcontractor to EDS on the MNIS System Engineering/Technical Assistance (SETA) contract, which was awarded under Encore II.

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