Peter Spiro, a highly respected leader in Microsoft started his career as a corn farmer. He talks about his experiences as travelled through life. I just love his insights.

Freshly invented Betavoltaic batteries can provide continuous power battery that for 30 years without a single recharge.

If all goes well plans are for these cells to reach store shelves in about 2 to 3 years.

God, let me live for another 33 years. You can take me just before I have to recharge this battery again.

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I like coding on the plane, even when I am flying coach and do not have access to the "oh so convenient" power socket. In fact my 22 hour trips back to India from Seattle to visit my family and friends are some of the my most productive time coding up something nifty. (I hope my manager is reading ;-))

To reduce my trips to the restroom to charge my laptop by plugging in to the shaver socket, I try and remove all the running processes that I can safely do without. So I fire up Task Manager and make it show processes from all users.

Once, I noticed I have 82 processes with 15 svchosts.exe with significant private working set and CPU Time. I wanted to selectively get rid of the ones which are not hosting one of the crucial services for the consistency of my system.

I just discoverd that on Vista, I can right click on any process in the task manager and click on the [Go to Service(s)]

.

It takes me to the services tab on the Task Manager with all the services hosted by that process highlighted.

This is uber cool! Now I know what's behind svchost or any other process and allows me to selectively kill processes which I can survive without.

Recent results in computational fluid dynamics from the University of Sheffield's Sports Engineering Research Group and Fluent indicate that the shape and surface of a soccer ball, as well as its initial orientation, play a fundamental role in the ball's trajectory through the air.

In particular, the CFD researchers have increased understanding of the "knuckleball" effect, a technique sometimes used to confuse an opposing goalkeeper. The research group focused on shots resulting from "free kicks," in which the ball is placed on the ground, as after a foul.

Fluent is an importatnt ISV application available on Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, the HPC platform from Microsoft. To understand how you can used Fluent for your simulation on Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, watch this webcast.

This theme music was created by my father, Kishore Sen, 45 minutes before had to be hospitalized and never to come back. He created the entire music on a Windows XP laptop which I had presented to him a year back. He was a geek, even though he was a 61 year old retired banker.

Here are some more of his works he created in his last week

dead or alive Trailer
Forza Motorsport

The next release of Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, the HPC platform from Microsoft will be based on Windows Server 2008.

We relased today Windows Server 2008 RC0. The announcement is here: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2007/sep07/09-24windowserverrc0.mspx …and the Windows Server 2008 RC0 download is here: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/audsel.mspx

This is a HUGE release as our ISVs will start testing their High Performance Computing solutions on this new platform, while our HPC dev teams are going full throttle at implementing additional value added features for the new High Performance Computing Platform. My last statement was meant to be vague for the moment.

Although I am dying to discuss all the cool stuff that we  are doing in our next release of the HPC platform, i cannot at the moment. But, hang on tight and stay tuned, we are near. I am going to open the floodgates of information the earliest I can (w/o upsetting our marketing folks ;-)).

 Till then go take Windows Server 2008 out for a spin.

At the High Performance Computing on Wall Street Show, Microsoft and GigaSpaces announced that they have been integrating Excel 2007 with GigaSpaces’ in-memory data grid solution at individual customer sites and will productize a joint solution in 2008. This will help eliminate data latency in such scenarios as research analysts making research available to traders and spreadsheet-based risk management. Each Gigaspaces unit can handle data services such as validate, check/match and execute order at a pace of 1,000 transactions per second and according to Geva Perry, chief marketing officer, and the units are infinitely scalable – two units will process 2,000 transactions per second and so forth

According to Diane Bryant, vice president of Intel's digital enterprise group and general manager of its server platforms group, "The only place AMD did better performance-wise with Barcelona is in HPC-like applications requiring more bandwidth. However, we've demonstrated performance for a number of years and have become [extremely comfortable] in that number one position so we're not going to do anything that will jeopardise that. We always benchmark ourselves against ourselves so let AMD do what AMD does." published on ITPro magazine.

Well I care a lot about performance of HPC applications, so I am worried for Intel and happy for AMD. If you are wondering why better memory bandwidth is good for HPC type applications read my earlier post here.

Also, I hope this helps AMD out of it debt which will help keep the marketplace competitive.

Hopefully, with Intel's overhaul of it's bus architecture and introduction of CSI, Intel will strike back to AMD in terms of performance of HPC type applications. But, I fear that it is several years out.

The Japanese version of Windows CCS MOM pack has been released! You find it at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=ja&FamilyID=53ae834a-7369-4655-82e5-1c2563cec677.

The MOM pack guide will be available online shortly

The University of Southampton, a Microsoft Institute for High Performance Computing at the University will be providing access to the Microsoft Compute Cluster Service through a Globus gateway. Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster Server on the National Grid Service, will interoperate with other resources on the UK National Grid.

The CCS Globus Gateway provides access to a cluster under the Windows x64 platform using the normal Globus client tools and Grid security mechanism, therefore makes it possible to share the Windows based computational resources with a wider user base in the e-Science community.

A large proportion of the UK research community primarily use Windows based systems or are more familiar with Windows than other operating systems. The implementation of the Globus Gateway will allow the NGS to be accessed by a much larger number of researchers who will be able to carry out research under a more familiar operating system.

I arrived at Bangok very early on Monday morning. I tried getting some sleep, but the jet lag combined with the dripping sound from the leaking AC at the hotel room only allowed intermittent slumber at best.

So, at 7:30 AM I decided to go out for breakfast and check out the morning life of the city. I always check out the morning life of any city I visit, it says a lot about the city's character.

I was astounded by the number of people in the street wearing yellow. It looked like the entire city was in some sort of school uniform.

Later as we were setting up the venue for the HPC Workshop, I asked Pum, our host at the venue about the mystery of the sea of yellow shirts.

She explained, that the King of Thailand was born on a Monday. Yellow is the color of Monday (don't ask me why). So, out of respect for the King, citizens of Thailand wear yellow every Monday.

In this day and age of cynicism, it was heartwarming to see the unquestioned and selfless love and respect for their King (a symbol of dignity). This is quite a contrast from papparazzi chased celebrity worship we have in most of our societies.

Last night I was on my way to Bangkok for speaking at a couple of HPC Partner Events. I was transiting through the Seoul Airport. It seemed synchronized dressing is very popular among young couples there. It seemed almost as important as engagment rings or wedding rings.

Here are some cameraphone snaps to make the point:

You get the point! I was wondering whether these couples buy every peice of shirt and trousers in pairs. Then imagine the challenge the stores are going to have, trying to stock pairs of garments in every possible size and design combinations.

For me, it was bizzare, a airport full of people in synchronized dressing.

Leave a comment if you have some insight about this trend!

As the insurance industry moves to stochastic measurement of reserves and capital, computing capacity needs are increasing exponentially. Coupled with the need to perform ever more complex risk calculations, this industry shift demands smarter and more deliberate investments in computing infrastructure and analytic applications

There is a webacst scheduled where folks from Milliman their solution accelerates the processing of complex models and large scenario counts in a real-time computing environment using Milliman's MG-ALFA and Windows Compute Cluster Server.They will review the benefits of the current MG-ALFA and Windows Compute Cluster Server integration, as well as the roadmap for new development efforts.

Should be interesting! To attend, register here