A new Ray Kurzweil book is always a major event. And his latest work, How To Create A Mind: The Secret Of Human Thought Revealed, is classic Kurzweil – both infuriatingly brilliant and brilliantly infuriating. Given Kurzweil’s remarkable intelligence, it might not be a coincidence that How To Create A Mind is a book about intelligence – focusing, in classic Kurzweilian territory, on the growing intelligence...

It was a Battle Royale at SC12 recently as the two leading accelertor vendors rolled out new products. Over at The Inquirer, Lawrence Latif writes that Nvidia is claiming that Intel’s entry into the HPC GPGPU market validates the use of accelerators and increases the market for its own Tesla GPUs. 

Over at Computerworld, Patrick Thibodeau writes that easily available and affordable “Apps” are coming to HPC. In the mobile space Apps tend to be simple packages that do one thing very well. For HPC, an App would work the same way on a specific task, such as modeling and simulating the flow of a fluid.

 In this video from SC12, Scott Lasica from Rogue Wave Software describes the company’s Totalview debugging tools for the new Intel Xeon Phi. Rogue Wave’s rich set of development tools and libraries, which will now also include support for the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor, bring valuable capabilities to software.