Coming out of the Vision Lab at the University of Antwerp, the FASTRA II is based on gaming hardware and designed with tomography, "a technique used in medical scanners to create three-dimensional images of the internal organs of patients," in mind. The Vision Lab team began building the FASTRA and the FASTRA II because tomographical image reconstruction can take up to weeks on an ordinary computer, but in the end they produced this reasonably small 6000 Euro supercomputer. Not too shabby for something that was mainly intended to reduce their processing times. [Fastra—Thanks, Kjoost!]

To put that in perspective, 10 megawatts is the kind of energy a small hydroelectric plant produces—20 watts is only enough juice to power up a weak light bulb. Amazingly, your physical brain runs on this minuscule amount of power, and it's not very efficient. However, embracing this inefficiency could be the key to creating computers that mimic the human brain.

It sounds cockamamy, but it is true. Scientists have found that the brain's 100 billion neurons are surprisingly unreliable. Their synapses fail to fire 30 percent to 90 percent of the time. Yet somehow the brain works. Some scientists even see neural noise as the key to human creativity. Boahen and a small group of scientists around the world hope to copy the brain's noisy calculations and spawn a new era of energy-efficient, intelligent computing. Neurogrid is the test to see if this approach can succeed.

Most modern supercomputers are the size of a refrigerator and devour $100,000 to $1 million of electricity per year. Boahen's Neurogrid will fit in a briefcase, run on the equivalent of a few D batteries, and yet, if all goes well, come close to keeping up with these Goliaths.

So far Boahen has managed to squeeze a million neurons onto his new supercomputer compared to only 45,000 last year. By 2011, he hopes to have 64 million up and running, bringing the project to the equivalent of a mouse's brain.

Ditching reliability and efficiency in favor of organized chaos flies in the face of everything that an engineer holds dear, but the approach does make sense—and reducing the power consumption is the key to upholding Moore's law. But how will this development change our perception of what an artificially intelligent robot might become? Instead of some cold, logical machine that can think for itself, we might end up with robots that are just as stupid and flawed as we are. In other words. it could be a robot on that episode of future Cops running through the bushes with no shirt on after trying to rob a convenience store with a plastic lightsaber. Think about it. [Discover Mag via PopSci]

Octane III is office-ready with a pedestal, one-by-two-foot form factor, whisper-quiet operations, easy-to-use features, low maintenance requirements and support for standard office power outlets. While a typical workstation has only eight cores and moderate memory capacity, the superior design of the Octane III permits up to 80 high-performance cores and nearly 1TB of memory for unparalleled performance...

Octane III is easily configurable with single- and dual-socket node choices, and offers a wide selection of performance, storage, graphics, GP-GPU and integrated networking options. Yielding the same leading power efficiencies inherent in all SGI Eco-Logical compute designs, Octane III supports the latest Intel processors to capitalize on greater levels of performance, flexibility and scalability.

For about $8,000, it's not cheap by normal computer standards, but by supercomputer standards it's a bargain. [SGI via The Inquirer via Boing Boing]

Name: Cray-1
Year created: 1976
Creator: Cray Research, Inc.
Cost: $5 million to $10 million
Memory: 4MW semiconductor
Speed: 160 MFLOPS

Building supercomputers was a dream, an aspiration, and a life's pursuit for Seymour Cray, and his work on the computers that bore his name was the culmination of work he had done for the U.S. Navy, for CDC [Control Data Corporation], and finally for his namesake company. When Cray left CDC in 1972, after his work on the 6600, 7600, and minimally the 8600, he took much of the supercomputer fire with him.

While Cray's departure from CDC wasn't overly dramatic, his impact on supercomputing was. Cray artfully designed computers so that each part worked to efficiently speed up the whole, and he usually didn't rely on the newest experimental components, preferring instead to tweak existing technologies for maximum performance. For instance, the Cray-1 was the first Cray machine to use integrated circuits, despite their having been on the market for about a decade. At 160 MFLOPS, the Cray-1 was the fastest machine at the time, and despite what seemed like only a niche market for expensive superfast machines, Cray Research sold more than a hundred of them.

Form and size were always concerns for Cray, as far back as his days developing the CDC 160, which was built into an ordinary desk. There was also a big concern with the heat that could be generated by so many parts being packaged so tightly together, so Cray's designs typically involved unique cooling solutions, whether it be Freon on the Cray-1, or Fluorinert, in which Cray-2's circuit boards were immersed.

Core Memory is a photographic exploration of the Computer History Museum's collection, highlighting some of the most interesting pieces in the history of computers. These excerpts were used with permission of the publisher. Special thanks to Fiona!

The photos in the book were taken by Mark Richards, whose work has appeared in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Fortune, Smithsonian, Life and BusinessWeek. The eye-candy is accompanied by descriptions of each artifact to cover the characteristics and background of each object, written by John Alderman who has covered the culture of high-tech lifestyle since 1993, notably for Mondo 2000, HotWired and Wired News. A foreword is provided by the Computer History Museum's Senior Curator Dag Spicer.

Or go see the real things at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.

Gizmodo '79 is a week-long celebration of gadgets and geekdom 30 years ago, as the analog age gave way to the digital, and most of our favorite toys were just being born.

The "cool stuff" will take about three weeks to get up and running, with the more visual demos coming at the tail-end of that. The one benchmark they currently have is that it hits 768 Gigaflops, which they hope to bump over 800 with some fine-tuning. Moving from Nvidia's Quadro 4600 to their newer Tesla cards should give the system a jolt as well, since they're explicitly designed for parallel computing applications, like what the CX1 is designed for.

The CX1 can hold up to eight computing blades—though the storage and visual blade each take up two slots, so the model they were showing had four computing blades, and one of each. While each blade is highly customizable, the cheapest one they had configured was about $4,000, and a fully spec'd out CX1 goes for about $85,000 (slightly higher than they originally announced). While it's not actually designed for gaming at all, for that much I'd want it to burn Crysis directly into my brain. [Cray]

This kind of setup works really well for tomography because the number-crunching can be done in parallel and is highly vectorized—the same kind of stuff the medical community and Air Force were eye-balling the PS3 for, since the Cell uses a similar kind of architecture.

On the other hand, it wouldn't be so great for more general computing stuffs that can't be crunched in parallel (multiple processors working at once). Either way, watch the video, gigaflops to terabytes, it's the nerdiest thing you'll see this week. [FASTRA, Thanks Toji]

The computer was built at the Max Planck Institute for plasma research in Germany, and basically uses an enhanced version of the water-cooling that PC modders love. Apparently it's what helps make this computer quite so "super" in such a small size.
In-chip cooling next, hey? That's pretty neat, and the leak-proofing is going to have to be amazing, but makes perfect sense with the 4,000 times efficiency water cooling offers over air cooling. [IBM press release via Gadget lab]

The bikes were hooked up to generators that supplied direct current energy to a converter which, in turn, fed couple of small SiCortex supercomputers with alternating current. At the time, the computers were running a program that simulates a fusion reaction. According to the findings, a traditional supercomputer would have required 10x as much electricity to perform the same calculations. In the end, the team did its part to promote alternative sources of energy —let's just hope, for the cycling team's sake, that the focus at MIT stays on nuclear fusion as this alternative energy source, and not the legs of its top athletes. [XConomy and Gizmag]

These interesting but admittedly vague and flaky estimates come from computer scientist Peter Gutman. Although you can pick at the numbers quite easily, the guy makes a very interesting point. While projects like Seti@Home can harness a lot of computing power, a virus or worm that doesn't need to ask permission from a user could conceivably be vastly more powerful. Imagine the potential if virus writers found more interesting things to do with those cycles than send spam.

Will the first person to find extraterrestrial signals be an amateur hacker, rather than Seti? Could complex protein folding solutions be found by bored crackers? And would the benevolent act of finding a cure for a genetic illness outweigh the malevolent act of creating the worm that rounded up the processing cycles needed to do it? [Uber Review]

It's called MicroWulf, and is based around four microATX motherboards. Each motherboard has its own dual core CPU and 2GB of RAM, and communicates with the others over Gigabit Ethernet. A complete list of hardware is after the link, if you're tempted to build your own. [Oh Gizmo!]

It has 10,240 CPUs, 20TB of RAM, 280TB of disk storage and runs on SUSE Linux. It can compute at 62.63 teraflops, with a peak performance of 94.21 teraflops, making it the most powerful computer in Europe. [Navel of Narcissus]

Baker will be up to the challenge, with 24,000 quad-core 2.6GHz AMD Opteron processors. It'll be no slouch with memory, either, where its makers are considering using between 187TB or 400TB of RAM, and have settled for just 11 petabytes of disk space. All this hardware squeezes into a mere 187 cabinets. But can it play Doom?

24,000 quad core Opteron system slated [The Inquirer]

• The big kahuna of supercomputing industry conventions (now there's a niche), SC|05, is going on all week in Seattle. Formerly a haven for computer science nerds only, the annual gathering is a lot more mainstream (there was even a Bill Gates sighting on Tuesday). The must-have swag at the show? A Sun Microsystems "No, I will not fix your computer" t-shirt. [Seattle Times]
  
• CBS, ABC, NBC, Fox, UPN and the WB hold a rare joint press conference to inform advertisers that the DVR isn't death incarnate for conventional TV commercials. One of the tenuous linchpins of their argument: DVR users pay more attention to what's flashing on-screen, even if it's a commercial that's being fast-forwarded at 10 times normal speed, so if something catches their eye, they'll rewind back to see it. Right, that makes sense. I'm predicting no one today will bring up the fact that you can easily enable a 30-second jump on TiVos that can completely skip an entire commercial without seeing one frame of it. [WSJ (reg)]
  
• WSJ tech maestro Walt Mossberg rattles off a list of his favorite tech blogs and doesn't mention the Giz. I guess that means I can rip on him for calling destinations like Digital Camera Resource and iLounge blogs, when they're really full-fledged websites that happen to have RSS feeds. I guess that means my favorite blog is the Wall St. Journal. [WSJ (reg)]
  
• Still over a week 'til Black Friday, but if you haven't already mapped out your day of tech buying gluttony, you're not a "savvy shopper". [Detroit Free Press]
  
• A USC student reviews the WiFi-rific Mario Kart DS for the school paper and absolutely loves it. If you're the kid's parents reading this, now you'll know why his GPA will dip this semester. Also, assuming he's playing online under the local Nintendo-McDonald's WiFi cloud, you'll also know why he's put on a few pounds. [The Daily Trojan].