Here is the abstract to a guide on Cloud Computing from Sun Microsystems. (Registration required)
Cloud computing is a popular buzzword—but what does it really mean, and why should you care? Get this free guide to cloud computing and let us help you make sense of the hype. You probably know generally how cloud computing provides [...]

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By Gastón C. Hillar
“As C# and Visual Basic (in the .Net world) and Java are high level programming languages, most developers were not used to check for some hardware information. With multicore microprocessors and a task-oriented programming model, trying to take full advantage of parallel processing capabilities offered by modern microprocessors, this is changing.
I’m preparing [...]

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President Barack Obama pledged to raise the level of U.S. federal spending on research and development to more than three percent of the country’s gross domestic product. He also named Microsoft chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie and Google chief executive Eric Schmidt to his board of advisors on science and technology.
Full Story

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The competitive edge of the European Union’s economy has risen over the past decade while that of the United States has eroded, according to a new study by a nonpartisan research group published Wednesday.
The report by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation found that the United States ranked sixth among 40 countries and regions, based [...]

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As we move to the next generation technologies, software production is becoming a much larger part of the embedded product development process. Critical areas like brake systems of automobile industry, gas control systems and in-home appliances use software technology with quality becoming a key factor.
Things like time to market, defective processes and resource constraints leads [...]

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By Hichem Belhadj, Vishal Aggrawal, Ajay Pradhan, and Amal Zerrouki, Actel
In Part 1 of this series, the authors introduced power-aware FPGA design. In Part 2, they discussed fighting dynamic power. In this last installment of this series, they continue discussion of fighting dynamic power and propose power reduction methodology. Here are some excerpts from their [...]

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NEC Electronics Europe has introduced its package HSON-8 for power semiconductors in automotive applications. The device offers similar performance as widespread packages at lower space requirements.
The package combines the small footprint of as a SOP-8 package with the thermal and electrical properties of a DPAK (aka TO-252) package, NEC claims. Thus, the footprint for [...]

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Some highlights of substantial investments in the nation’s science and engineering enterprise proposed in The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 include:
* Investing in Scientific Research (More than $15 Billion) Provides $3 billion for the National Science Foundation, for basic research in fundamental science and engineering – which spurs discovery and innovation.
* $1.6 billion [...]

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Ilya Mirman of Cilk Arts writes an article on how multicore can help deal with computing requirements of companies during the tough economic times we are facing at the moment.
“Within 12-24 months, 8- and 16-core systems will be commonplace. So if you are a software vendor, then multicore offers a major way for [...]

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Scott D. Anthony and Leslie Feinzaig wrote an article (for Forbes magazine) in July 2008 about plans for innovation during a recession. Here are some excerpts.
“Whether or not the U.S. or the global economy meets an economist’s definition of a recession, it is clear that corporations are currently tightening their collective belts. What implications does [...]

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This month’s theme of IEEE Computing Society’s Computing Now magazine is Cloud computing. Here is an article by Neal Leavitt, that discusses whether cloud computing is really ready.
“Cloud computing has become a significant technology trend, and many experts expect it to reshape information-technology processes and the IT marketplace during the next five years. With the [...]

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Operators of the supercomputing center at Argonne National Laboratory used innovations in both computer architecture and cooling methods to achieve over $1 million in annual energy savings for its IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer. Supercomputers typically consume multiple megawatts of electricity. At 557 teraflops, Argonne’s Blue Gene/P is one of the fastest supercomputers in the world, [...]

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Many mechanical and electronic systems run part-time — air conditioning, for instance. The dutycycle is the fraction of time the system is on, typically expressed as a percentage, from 0 percent (always off) to 100 percent (always on). A related metric is the length of an on-off cycle, the cycle time. The dutycycle program in [...]

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Even though the DOORS OS is an operating system designed to run on the HC11, there’s nothing stopping you from porting the code to your processor of choice.
DOORS OS is an embedded operating system designed to run on the HC11 8-bit microcontroller. While DOORS OS requires at least 2KB of program memory and 512 bytes [...]

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The green approach has come to HPC. While green designs are often associated with low power and low performance, in HPC, however, green is about efficiency, high performance, and maximizing your computing dollar.
Power and cooling have become the number one issue facing many HPC sites and a green design is one answer to this problem. [...]

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Author: Jean J. Labrosse, President of Micrium for Embedded.com
“Embedded systems have brought about and enabled the very necessary change that took place in one of the shortest technological transition periods in modern history.
Every new year, I find myself reminiscing about the past. This time, as I was going through my box of “artifacts,” I found [...]

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Is the smartphone the new computer? That’s a point that has been argued back and forth extensively but it misses the point, which is that the smartphone isn’t really a traditional computer at all.
Symmetric Multiprocessing or SMP, a feature earlier found only on servers and more recently on PCs will soon find its way to [...]

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EDN Senior Technical Editor Brian Dipert exposes, analyzes and opines on diverse topics in technology. In this article, he gives his impressions of Microsoft’s Windows Hardware Engineering Conference in Los Angeles. Here are a couple of excerpts from that article.
“Windows 7 will launch start-up services, drivers and other chunks of code in parallel, versus sequentially, [...]

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According to an announcement from Interactive Supercomputing, researchers at The University of Texas’ M. D. Anderson Cancer Center are applying new supercomputing technology to biomedical imaging in the quest to detect and eliminate cancer.
As a stepping stone toward more advanced infrastructures such as large scale clusters and SMPs, M. D. Anderson’s Department of Imaging Physics’ [...]

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Solar breakthroughs are relatively commonplace. However, typically they are iterative — small increases by a percent or two in efficiency. Researchers at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have invented a new solar cell that is anything but iterative as it blows away past offerings by a large margin; something RPI calls a “game-changer” for [...]

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