Interview: Intel’s Alan Gara on Pathfinding for Exascale

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July 8, 2013

Over at The Exascale Report, Mike Bernhardt brings us this new interview with Alan Gara, Intel’s Chief Exascale Architect. Formerly chief system architect for the three generations of BlueGene supercomputers at IBM, Gara has been out of the limelight since he left Big Blue in 2011. In this interview, he describes Intel’s vision for co-design and fabric integration.

We need to transition our thinking from energy efficiency at the transistor level – to energy efficiency at the system level. There will need to be many innovations to pull this off. New memory microarchitectures are absolutely critical. Similarly we will be depending on continued scaling of our silicon technology. The last I would mention is silicon photonics. Supercomputers will be pushing the communications requirements. Without silicon photonics the cost of a highly usable system would likely be prohibitive.

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Intel/NVIDIA/AMD Compete On Linux GPU Driver Performance

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Phoronix

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July 8, 2013

After recently delivering a 15-way open-source Intel/AMD/NVIDIA GPU comparison, here are the benchmarks when tossing in the proprietary AMD Catalyst and NVIDIA graphics drivers too. Besides comparing a diverse selection of graphics processors from the three main desktop GPU vendors, this comparison also shows how the current open-source Linux graphics drivers compare to the official proprietary drivers.

Novena Open Source Laptop Trades Raspberry Pi Headers for Power

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The H

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July 8, 2013

Former Chumby developer Andrew “bunnie” Huang has published details about a new revision of the board for his open source Novena development laptop. The new board includes a more powerful FPGA and a high speed data header.

App Store in the Driver’s Seat: Here Comes Your Next Car

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CNET

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July 8, 2013

The automotive industry is getting in on the app craze with programs that can be downloaded directly to the car. CNET looks at the potential benefits — and headaches — of having an app store on wheels. [Read more]

How Embedded Linux Devices Will Be Specialized with Celeum

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OpenSource.com

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July 8, 2013

Before the PC, computers were devices: custom hardware combined with software specifically written for the machine, and the machines themselves were usually designed for a select few (if not single) purposes. The problem that PCs seemed to address was diversity. Where customers had previously relied on one company to support both hardware and software, the PC clones opened the doors to a brave new world where anyone could build, support, or maintain a computer.

It was a revolution that made computers affordable enough for anyone to own, for any business to adopt, and allowed countless entrepreneurs and skilled technicians to find work for themselves: outside the confines of long established corporate hierarchies. Unfortunately, the open source software revolution took much longer.

Distribution Release: Legacy OS 2.1 “Gamer”

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DistroWatch

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July 8, 2013

John Van Gaans has announced the release of Legacy OS 2.1 “Gamer” edition, a Puppy-based distribution designed for, you’ve guessed it, PC gaming enthusiasts: “Our best releases coming in 2013 starting with Legacy OS 2.1 Gamer available now. To start things off Legacy OS 2 Gamer has been….

Ageism in Tech Sector? Survey Uncovers Large Age Difference

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ZDNet

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July 8, 2013

The median age of workers at tech companies can be more than 16 years below the national average…

Read more at Enterprise Open Source Toolkit

Startup Hawks Android Phone Via ‘Budget iPhone’ Video

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CNET

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July 7, 2013

Whether Techdy’s budget iPhone video is the real deal or not, it’s a novel way to market an Android phone. [Read more]

The Ease of Choosing a Distro

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The Linux Foundation

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July 7, 2013

One of the complaints that sometimes flies against this position is that there are too many distros. This argument is made by those who can’t easily enter a Baskin-Robbins without breaking into cold sweat — 31 different flavors? Too many! — or have a hard time with choosing what color socks to wear. In many cases, the “too many distros” argument stems from this premise: “There are too many distros, so you and everyone else should use my distro,” and my distro, wait for it, always seems to be the vowel-laden one which goes light-years out of its way to say it’s not a Linux-based distro.

Meanwhile, back at the original point: Distro-hoppers know first hand that trying out a vast range of distros is a time consuming task, and that there must be an easier way to find that special distro.

Leave it to TuxRadar to provide you with a tool to help you out there. TuxRadar’s Linux Distro Picker can help you if you just can’t decide which distro you want to run.

Read more at Larry the Free Software Guy

New Unified VMA Offset Manager, Render Node Patches

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Phoronix

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July 7, 2013

David Herrmann has a GSoC project for working on DRM render and mode-set nodes and so far he has been making great progress. On Sunday he posted his second revision of his unified VMA offset manager patch-set and DRM render node work…