Prior to closing the merge window for X.Org Server 1.13, Keith Packard pulled Daniel Stone’s latest patches, which have killed off XAA acceleration support for DDX drivers…
Read more at Phoronix
Nokia Bridge: Nokia’s Incubator Gives Departing Employees €25k And More To Pursue Ideas That Nokia Has Not
Nokia may still be fighting some pretty major fires on its burning platform, but it’s also building some bridges — namely the Nokia Bridge incubator program — to help those running from the flames, with financing of up to €250,000 ($308,000) to pursue new startups, before they’ve even paid a visit to VCs and angel investors.
The activities in Nokia Bridge are a small but encouraging counterpoint to the fairly-constant, grim updates on the state of the Finnish mobile company, once the world’s biggest by a long shot, and now under the gun with falling handset sales and dwindling cash reserves as it struggles to compete against the Apple/Android smartphone juggernaut. It’s understood that there are already some 100 companies in the incubator — dozens in the UK alone — although Nokia has not published a list of them anywhere. Jolla, the startup formed by ex-Nokia execs that will try to give MeeGo phones another shot, is one of them.
The basic idea goes like this: Nokia Bridge helps departing employees (there are thousands of them right now) start their own companies.
Some of these are coming out of projects the ex-Nokians may have been pursuing when they were still at Nokia, killed off during the company’s major strategic changes over the last year and a half (eg MeeGo). Others will be something completely different. David Hall, a spokeperson for Nokia Bridge in the UK, tells me that one of the UK startups in the program is developing a wine import/export business (thinking outside the bottle! hah hah).
Each ex-employee gets €25,000 ($30,800), and up to four Nokians can come together for a project — meaning your startup could get a seed fund of €100,000.
Read more at TechCrunch
Interview: Whamcloud Wins FastForward Contract for Exascale R&D
Today Whamcloud announced that the company has been awarded the Storage and I/O Research & Development subcontract for the Department of Energy’s FastForward program. FastForward is set up to initiate partnerships with multiple companies to accelerate the R&D of critical technologies needed for extreme scale computing. To learn more, I caught up with Eric Barton, Whamcloud’s CTO.
insideHPC: Many DOE applications place extreme requirements on computations, data movement, and reliability. What aspects will Whamcloud focus on in this contract?
Eric Barton: All of the above. We’re researching a completely new I/O stack suitable for Exascale.
At the top the stack we’re building an object-oriented storage API based on HDF5 to support high-level data models, their properties and relationships. This will use a non-blocking initiation and completion notification APIs to ensure application developers can overlap compute and I/O naturally and efficiently. The API will also allow distributed updates to be grouped into atomic transactions to ensure that application data and metadata stored in the Exascale storage system remains self consistent in the face of all possible failures.
In the middle of the I/O stack, we’re prototyping a Burst Buffer using persistent solid-state storage accessed using OS bypass technology and a data layout optimizer based on PLFS. This part of the stack, running on dedicated I/O nodes of the Exascale machine, will handle the impedance mismatch between the smooth streaming I/O required for efficient disk utilization with the bursty, fragmented and misaligned I/O that Exascale applications will produce.
At the bottom of the stack we’re designing a new scalable I/O API to replace POSIX for distributed applications. Called DAOS, for Distributed Application Object Storage, This API will support asynchronous transactional I/O within scalable object collections. This will provide the functionality, performance, scalability and fault tolerance foundational to the whole Exascale I/O stack.
Read more at insideHPC