« September 29, 2021 | Main | October 1, 2021 »

September 30, 2021 Archives

Thursday, September 30, 2021

CONTINUITY: The Rise and Fall of Teletext

Posted at 14:23 Permalink

TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: “In Event of Moon Disaster” Deep Fake Film Wins Emmy

The film was announced as the winner in the “Outstanding Interactive Media: Documentary” category.

Here is the full film.

The documentary “To Make a Deepfake” explains how it was made.

For more information, visit the project's Web site, moondisaster.org.

Posted at 13:28 Permalink

THE HAPPENING WORLD: Cooling High-Performance Microprocesors

In the 1960s and 1970s, supercomputers were all about cooling. High speed circuits, in particular emitter-coupled logic (ECL), which ran their transistors out of the saturation zone in the interest of fast switching, were famously power-hungry and consumed current constantly, not just when switching. Consequently, they took a lot of power and dissipated abundant heat, which had to be efficiently removed from the components. Some amazing schemes were used, such as the IBM thermal conduction module and the Cray-2, which bathed its logic circuits in circulating Fluorinert fluid cooled in an external “waterfall”.

The advent of power-stingy CMOS circuitry, which consumes almost no power except when actually switching, and the benefits of the Dennard scaling theorem as circuit geometries shrunk over the years, halted the correlation of power consumption with computing speed for decades, but around 2006 the end of the road was reached, resulting in cessation of rapid increases in clock speed and an increasing focus on multi-core and other parallel architectures. Since then, heat has returned as a major issue in high performance computing.

As the next generation of processors comes into view, the power dissipation limits of forced air and even water cooling by conduction from conventional packages are reaching their limits. This video surveys approaches to coping with this challenge, including piping water right into processor chips to cool them by direct contact with the back side of the silicon substrate,

Posted at 11:19 Permalink

CONTINUITY: Tour of the International Space Station Tranquility (Node 3) Module

The tour of the International Space Station continues with NASA's Tranquility module, also known as Node 3, launched to the station in February 2010 by space shuttle Endeavour on the STS-130 mission. Tranquility is the module to which the viewing Cupola is attached, but it is not shown in this visit recorded during orbital night when there would have been nothing to see. This tour, presented in 360° immersive video (hold down your mouse button within the image and move the pointer to pan and tilt your viewpoint), is led by European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Pesquet. The audio is in French, with English subtitles. (If the subtitles are not automatically enabled, click the “CC” box at the bottom to turn them on.)

Posted at 10:28 Permalink