Charbax Talks at the MIT, Boston Linux & Unix user group meeting

Posted by – April 19, 2018

My remote talk at MIT over a voice-only connection (video connection was unstable) from Hong Kong (where I am now video-blogging at the China Sourcing Fair) at the Lightning Talks 2018 at Boston Linux & Unix user group, part of The Boston Computer Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Building E51, hosted by Brian DeLacey and Kurt Keville. This is an edit of only my talk, you can watch all the other talks at their YouTube video link here.

Allwinner R18, R16, R6 for Amazon Alexa and other smart speaker systems, B288 for E Ink e-reader


Allwinner Smart Home solutions including their chipsets and development kit for the R18 which I also filmed here the $26 (169rmb) Allwinner R16 powered Xiao’ ai Classmate Smart Speaker Mini by Xiaomi to be delivered in over 5 million units quantity, smart speakers by DIngDong. The Allwinner R6 enables even lower priced smart speakers with a maximum of 2 microphone in the microphone array for devices that will be closer to the user. The Allwinner B288 enables E Ink e-reader supported by DongDong which is China’s leading online book store. The Allwinner MR100 powers the fully open source drone project by Kudrone. The Xiaomi Drone uses the Allwinner R16 too. The Allwinner FC1600 powers the Niutingting Early Learning Machine by Benew which reads stories for kids for 2-6 years old. Allwinner T3 for car dashboard and smart mirror, T8 for in-car entertainment. The Xiaomi Robot Vaccum Cleaner uses the Allwinner R16 and uses lasers to calculate distance to walls and navigate to vaccum and mop the floor.

Allwinner V5, real 4K30 action camera and security/smart camera chipset

Posted by – April 19, 2018

Allwinner V5 chip uses the HawkView 5.0 image processing engine, which integrates 2D/3D intelligent noise reduction, frame width dynamic synthesis, sharpening enhancement, specific color enhancement and other image pre-processing technologies, combined with various types of image scene requirements, for each frame of the picture it applies real-time fine detail recovery. This chipset is for the “real” 4K action camera and 4K-enhanced security camera solutions, where smart object tracking can enhance the resolution only of the moving objects to save on bandwidth. Also the Allwinner V5 encodes using H265 to provide for about the same quality at about half the bitrate compared with H264.

Allwinner VR9 (hopefully Daydream All-in-one ready) launched, VR-optimized quad-core ARM Cortex-A53

Posted by – April 19, 2018

The new Allwinner VR9 is quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 processor with an independent 32KB L1 I-cache + 32KB L1 D-cache, shared 512KB L2 cache, with MaliT760 GPU and support for OpenGLES 3.2 and OpenCL 1.1. Allwinner VR9 is the first SoC optimized for VR, with as low as dedicated 20ms low latency acceleration module portal, dual-engine direct drive dual-screen system, panoramic 6K visual effects with support for expansive camera positioning, up to 6K30 H265 and 4K60 HEVC/VP9 video decode. Allwinner’s hope is that this SoC can be compatible with the Google Daydream platform for All-in-one VR device usage.

EmdoorVR Allwinner VR9 design house

Posted by – April 19, 2018

Emdoor is one of the largest design houses in Shenzhen, here they talk about their support for the new Allwinner VR9 quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 processor with an independent single core 32KB L1 I-cache + 32KB L1 D-cache, shared 512KB L2 cache, with MaliT760 GPU and support for OpenGLES 3.2 and OpenCL 1.1. Allwinner VR9 is the first SoC optimized for VR, with as low as dedicated 20ms low latency acceleration module portal, dual-engine direct drive dual-screen system, panoramic 6K visual effects with support for expansive camera positioning, up to 6K30 H265 and 4K60 HEVC/VP9 video decode.

Allwinner A63, A50, A33G

Posted by – April 16, 2018

Allwinner releases their new ARM SoCs for 64bit and 32bit cost effective tablets, featuring their new Allwinner A63 Quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 with Mali-T760MP2 GPU. This video was filmed at the Allwinner press conference event in Shenzhen where they had a lot of their industry partners, design houses, factories, OEMs, software partners, to see and to hear about the latest of what Allwinner has been working to do for them. The new Allwinner A50 is Allwinner’s mid-range Quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 with Mali-400 GPU with support for DDR4 and LPDDR4 RAM, better TLC based Flash memory. For the very entry level Tablet market, Allwinner presents their new Allwinner A33G which is limited at a lower 1.35Ghz clock-speed with a lower resolution display support. While these 3 new ARM Processors by Allwinner are presented as their newest Tablet processors, they are also compatible with all sorts of other devices which could be Robots, interactive Smart Speakers with displays, Smart Rearview Mirrors, Smart Mirrors, Laptops, Desktops, and more. Allwinner also talks about their participation in the Open AI Labs which I also filmed here.

NASA Supercomputer at Ames Research Center in the Silicon Valley

Posted by – April 8, 2018

NASA is using Supercomputing for aeronautics research, acoustics accross airplanes, cruise vehicles, launch vehicles also using supercomputing for earth science.

IBM Supercomputer on Power9 and Nvidia GPU

Posted by – April 8, 2018

Using IBM Power9 and Nvidia Volta GPU technology, the Summit system is a proven AI pioneer expected to deliver in excess of 200 Peta flops of performance, likely making it one of the world’s most powerful supercomputer.

Arm Allinea Studio, Supercomputing Scientific performance tools for ARM Servers

Posted by – April 8, 2018

The new Arm Allinea Studio release is a comprehensive and integrated tools suite to help Scientific computing, HPC and Enterprise developers to achieve best performance on modern server-class Arm-based platforms. Check out https://developer.arm.com/hpc for more info.

Singularity HPC container for Supercomputing

Posted by – April 8, 2018

Singularity enables users to have full control of their environment. Singularity containers can be used to package entire scientific workflows, software and libraries, and even data. This means that you don’t have to ask your cluster admin to install anything for you – you can put it in a Singularity container and run. Did you already invest in Docker? The Singularity software can import your Docker images without having Docker installed or being a superuser. Need to share your code? Put it in a Singularity container and your collaborator won’t have to go through the pain of installing missing dependencies. Do you need to run a different operating system entirely? You can “swap out” the operating system on your host for a different one within a Singularity container. As the user, you are in control of the extent to which your container interacts with its host. There can be seamless integration, or little to no communication at all. Read more: http://singularity.lbl.gov/index.html

CSCS Swiss National Supercomputing Centre at SC17

Posted by – April 6, 2018

The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre is the national high-performance computing centre of Switzerland.

Simon Hammond of Sandia National Laboratories at SC17

Posted by – April 6, 2018

Talking about the Exascale Supercomputers being built and developed at the Sandia National Laboratories in the USA.

Supercomputing Workshops at SC17

Posted by – April 6, 2018

Talking about the 37 workshops at the Supercomputing Denver conference.

Student Cluster Competition at SC17 Supercomputing Denver

Posted by – April 6, 2018

Tour of all the teams at the Student Cluster Competition at the SC17 Supercomputing Denver event, read more at http://studentclustercompetition.us/2017/

UMass Boston students at the Supercomputing Student Cluster Competition

Posted by – April 6, 2018

Students of the University of Massachusetts Boston with the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC) at the http://studentclustercompetition.us/2017/

Cavium ThunderX2 (HPC applications and performance)

Posted by – April 6, 2018

Surya Hotha, Director, Product Marketing at Cavium, talks Innovative Alternate Architecture for Exascale Computing at the SC17 Supercomputing ARM HPC User Group event in Denver. See my other Cavium ThunderX videos here.

slideshow

Jon “maddog” Hall talks Unix and Linux history

Posted by – March 31, 2018

Jon “maddog” Hall gives a brief history of the period of 1969 to 2019 with regard to 50 years of Unix and Internet advancement. Some of the high (and low) points of that period and its meaning to computer science of today. He calls for a celebration in the year 2019 of the women and men who made these advances possible. 2019 will be 50 years of Unix, 25 years of usable Linux, Linus Torvalds’s 50 years old, 10 years since the start of the ideas to setup Linaro and more.

OptDyn Subutai Open Source p2p Cloud Software, Bazaar and Blockchain Router

Posted by – March 31, 2018

Jon “maddog” Hall describes OptDyn(tm), makers of Subutai(tm) Open Source Peer-to-Peer Cloud Software, the Subutai Bazaar, and the Subutai Blockchain Router that not only is a broadband router for the home or business, but is also an IoT gateway, NAS server (with programmable RAID) and energy efficient cryptocurrency router. maddog explains why these features are important to consumers and businesses.

Keynote: Laura Dekker, The Machine as Alien Ethnographer

Posted by – March 29, 2018

HKG18-500K2 – Keynote: Laura Dekker – The Machine as Alien Ethnographer: Advanced Computation, Open Source Systems and Art

The last decade or so of development in open source hardware, software and data has brought an astonishing richness of resources for artists: Python and C++ libraries for natural language processing, biological simulation, data programming and machine learning – such as TensorFlow, NLTK, openFrameworks and project Gutenberg. As well as continually expanding functionality, increased accessibility has drastically brought down the barriers to entry and exploration.

Keynote: Datacenter Trends with Qualcomm’s Dileep Bhandarkar at Linaro Connect Hong Kong 2018

Posted by – March 29, 2018

For decades we have been able to take advantage of Moore’s Law to improve single thread performance, reduce power and cost with each generation of semiconductor technology. While technology has advanced after the end of Dennard scaling more than 10 years ago, the advances have slowed down. Server performance increases have relied on increasing core counts and power budgets.
At the same time, workloads have changed in the era of cloud computing. Scale out is becoming more important than scale up. Domain specific architectures have started to emerge to improve the energy efficiency of emerging workloads like deep learning
This talk will provide a historical perspective and discuss emerging trends driving the development of modern servers processors.