AN INTELLIGENT PLUG

An ‘intelligent’ plug is being developed that will switch off electrical devices such as TVs and desk lamps when they are not being used.
It is part of an electrical system designed to cut household power bills by keeping watch over energy use.
Home owners will be told how much power every device is soaking up, and when equipment is operating needlessly.

The system will also detect and switch off devices that have been carelessly left on in empty rooms.
Researchers hope to see the plugs fitted as standard to all domestic appliances within a few years.
They will transmit information to a central control point in the home.
Dr John Woods, one of the researchers working on the project at the University of Essex in Colchester, said: “Home owners will be able to see how much power every single device uses.
“You will be able to see if a fridge has failed, or if something has been left on that should not have been.”
The plug, which will look no different from a normal 13 amp one, will also contain an ‘integrated motion sensor’, The Engineer magazine reported.

The new smart plug will look the same as a 13 amp one but is designed to cut energy bills

This will detect when there is little activity in a room where a device such as a TV has been left on. The plug will alert the central controller, which can then switch the device off.
“If something is turned off and you don’t want it to be, you simply flick the switch off and flick it back on again and the central controller will recognise that you don’t like that service being compromised,” said Dr Woods.
The plug is being developed with a £90,000 award from the Carbon Connections Development Fund, a green initiative managed by the University of East Anglia.
The aim is to reduce domestic energy consumption, which is responsible for a third of all the electricity used in the UK.
A batch of prototypes should be ready within six months, say the researchers.
They will be tested in Essex University’s ‘iSpace’ department, where hi-tech gadgets can be tried out in home surroundings.
Dr Woods estimates that the plugs would have to cost less than £1 each to be a commercial proposition. However, with mass production he believes this should be possible.
A spokesman for the Energy Saving Trust said: “The average British household wastes £28 each year by leaving appliances on standby. Across the UK this is equivalent to the annual output of more than two 700megawatt power stations.”

CHEER UP INDIANS ! SUPER-COMPUTER DEVELOPED BY TATA RANKED 4TH FASTEST IN WORLD & FASTEST IN ASIA

The supercomputer facility at Computational Research Laboratories (CRL), a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Sons, has been ranked as the 4th fastest in the world and is the fastest supercomputer in Asia, according to the Top 500 Supercomputer list announced at SC07, the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis at Reno, Nevada, USA.

Called EKA (the Sanskrit name for number one), the supercomputer built at the CRL facility at Pune, India, marks a milestone in the Tata Group’s effort to build an indigenous high-performance computing solution. CRL built the supercomputer facility using dense data centre layout and novel network routing and parallel processing library technologies developed by its scientists.

EKA uses nearly 1,800 computing nodes and has a peak performance of 170 teraflops (tflops or trillion floating point operations per second) and a sustained performance of 120 teraflops based on the LINPACK benchmarks which are used by the world-wide community to rank supercomputers based on performance.

EKA, the CRL supercomputer, follows a near-circular layout of the data centre unlike the traditional hot aisle and cold aisle rows. This near-circular layout enables the building of densely packed supercomputers, and this is the first time this architecture has been tried out on this scale.

Ratan Tata, Chairman of the Tata Group said: “High performance computing solutions have an ever-increasing role in the scientific and new technological space the world over. The Tata Group has supported this development activity and is extremely proud of the team that has developed and built this supercomputer, which is now ranked as the world’s fourth fastest. I am sure this supercomputer and its successor systems will make a major contribution to India’s ongoing scientific and technological initiatives.”

“CRL’s supercomputer, EKA, has put India at the forefront of high performance and supercomputing technology globally. EKA gives us the ability to address applications in multiple disciplines including software development and research,” said S Ramadorai, chairman of CRL and CEO and MD of Tata Consultancy Services. “The successful launch of the supercomputer has been driven by an exemplary team at CRL working collaboratively with scientists across the Tata Group.”

The CRL supercomputer has been built using CLOS architecture with off-the-shelf servers and infiniband interconnect technologies with Linux as the operating system. This is the first ever site in the world which has used the dual data rate infiniband with fibre-optic cable technology for superior performance.

The CRL supercomputer includes nodes and racks built by Hewlett Packard (HP Cluster Platform 3000 BL460c system), which uses high-speed quad-core Clovertown processors from Intel Corp and dual data rate infiniband switches from Mellanox Corp and Voltaire Corp. The CRL team has been actively supported by scientists and engineers at Tata Consultancy Services.

In the near term, CRL is targeting and developing applications such as neural simulation, molecular simulation, computational fluid dynamics, crash simulation, and digital media animation and rendering. The long-term application areas would include: financial modelling, seismic modelling, geophysical signal processing, weather prediction, medical imaging, nanotechnology, personalised drug discovery, real-time rendering, and virtual worlds among others. CRL also intends to offer high-performance and supercomputer system integration, research, applications and software services to its customers around the globe in the area of high-performance computing.

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CONVERT YOUR THOUGHTS TO CODE ? ! ?

21st century has seen many developments and advances in the way things are done, and the amount of gadgets and innovations flooding the markets everyday is amazing! And till now, people used to bow in respect to the software developers who created this magic, generating software programs that go into these revolutionary “objects” and make our life simpler and fascinating. But I was seriously shocked, (surprised, astonished, wide-eyed, etc etc) when I read about this product – a software that writes by itself!!

The famous inventor of Microsoft Word and Excel, Charles Simonyi, has come out with his new innovation, the “Intentional Software”, slated to be released probably by this fall, is a software so smart that you can simply tell it what you want and it’ll write the code for you. Hurray!! everyone does not need to be a programmer anymore!! Simonyi and his startup have been working on this for 7 years. it centers on Domain Workbench, a human-language graphically friendly representation of the software as it is built.. Users can write clear instructions in text, spreadsheet or flowchart describing what they want the software to do (basic logic), which is then sent to a code-generator, and the latter spews out lines of code to build the application. f course, human engineers are still needed to help set up the programming language and tweak for some changes. But still, the major load is taken care of. For further details,

visit http://www.intentionalsoftware.com/

This could prove to be the next generation of software programming, and a boon to solve business problems, but will it be successful? People are skeptical about Simonyi’s ideas, and yet you’ll also find strong supporters who believe this could change the standards of technology by removing human errors or “bugs”. What happens, is for you and me to see, but till then, I think we’ll just revel in this fantastic tech innovation!