January 21, 2009 by
Jason
What, exactly, are supercomputers? The clue is in the name, really: they’re powerful computers capable of calculating many millions of floating operations per second (FLOPS) essentially, they’re very, very fast.
While any array of powerful computers, such as a modern-day web server which consists of several motherboards (the main circuit board of a computer) running in parallel can be considered a supercomputer, generally the term is reserved for machines that dedicate their entire hardware to one complex task at any given time.
Take the NEC Earth Simulator in Japan, for example, which was created specifically for modelling weather problems associated with global warming. Or the world’s fastest computer, BlueGene/L at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US, which simulates the behaviour of biomolecular structures and protein folding. It’s capable of 600 trillion FLOPS (tera-FLOPS or TFLOPS), whereas, the six-year-old Earth Simulator is only capable of 36TFLOPS. BlueGene/L won’t hold the top spot for long, though. Supercomputers twice as powerful will be online soon. Read More»
Posted in Computer, Hardware | No Comments »
January 06, 2009 by
Jason Microsoft is optimizing Windows 7 in order to increase performance, and, in this context, the dispatcher lock is one of the components that has got cut off . According to the Redmond company, fewer hardware locks are synonymous with boosted parallelism, namely a new level of efficiency when it comes down to taking advantage of modern processing architectures. This is valid for Windows Server 2008 R2, namely Windows 7 Server, and, naturally, also for the Windows 7 client, since the two operating systems share the same code base.
“With Windows 7, the dispatcher lock is replaced with several finer-grained synchronization techniques, thus effectively distributing resource contention. The main benefits for applications include increased system performance and more optimal use of available hardware resources,” Phil Pennington, Windows Server Technical Evangelism, revealed.
Evolving from Windows Vista, Windows 7 is embracing the many core CPU world, delivering the promise of enhanced performance through the advantage represented by parallel computing. However, in order for Win7 to be tailored to many core processors, the platform’s kernel had to be freed from past relics such as the dispatcher lock. Read More»
Posted in Windows 7 | 1 Comment »
September 18, 2008 by
Jason If you use a 64-bit version of Windows Vista on a computer with multiple processors or on a multi-core (dual-core, quad-core) processor (which is quite usual), you can use a simple setting to accelerate booting of the computer (OS).
Depending on the configuration of your computer, this setting may result in a smaller or substantial improving of the Windows booting time. Please be aware that this setting is not intended for novice users and it can cause booting problems on incompatible (mostly “noname”) computers.
By default, Vista detects and switches to a multi-processor core only after the basic functions of Windows are loaded – for actual booting it uses only a single core (logical processor). With the following setting you will enable using of all available cores/processors also for booting.
Run the MSCONFIG command (Start > Run) and go to the “Boot” tab. There click the “Advanced options” button. In the “BOOT advance options” dialog check the “Number of processors” option and set the number of processor cores you have available in your PC. Exit the command with OK. The following restart should be faster. Read More»
Posted in Windows Vista | 4 Comments »
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