Supercomputer as a Service: It's realty now!

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Network Computing reports... Nearly one and a half years after making a stunning entry into the global supercomputer list with Eka, ranked as the fourth fastest supercomputer in the world, Computational Research Laboratories (CRL), a Tata Sons’ subsidiary, has succeeded in creating a new market for supercomputers – that of offering supercomputing power on rent to enterprises in India. For now, for want of a better word, let us call it ‘Supercomputer as a Service.’ With more than 40 organizations in India hiring its services, CRL has made a mark in a field where only a few organizations have dared to venture. In a period of recession, Eka has opened up new possibilities for industries that require the massive crunching power of supercomputers, but only during certain times of their product development lifecycle.

For example, Tata Elxsi used Eka’s processing power to crunch the time required for rendering the animation movie, ‘Roadside Romeo.’ The activity, which would have taken the firm approximately 36-40 months to digitally render the movie in a studio, took only six months, due to the computing power of Eka. It is also significant to note that the firm achieved this feat using only one-third of the processing power of Eka.

Similarly, leading aerospace company, Boeing, is using Eka’s capability to bring its ideas faster to the market, by offering design and simulation support. Group company, Tata Motors, is using Eka for vehicle simulation and testing digital prototypes. CRL is also looking at potential opportunities in sectors such as Life Science, weather forecasting, animation and in the automotive and aviation industries. This is just a glimpse of the processing power.

You may visit Network Computing website for more details.

S8300 UltraTouch: Samsung's 8MP touch phone

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Samsung S8300 UltraTouch: The 3G-enabled phone aims to give tough competition to not its touchscreen contemporaries but also promises to be a contender in the digicam space with its 8 megapixel camera. Here's a peek into the new Samsung S8300 UltraTouch, which takes the Korean giant's touchscreen phones portfolio to four in the Indian market.



Samsung S8300 is the world's first Active Matrix (AM) OLED display touchscreen phone. The slider S8300 features a large 7.2 cm, scratch resistant, AMOLED display and is just 12.7mm thin. AM OLED pixels turn on and off more than three times faster than the speed of conventional motion picture film which makes these displays ideal for fluid, full-motion video. The phone has 3 by 4 alpha-numeric keypad and comes in a brushed metal frame. The phone sports a red/blue bezel as the slider opens. The phone features a 8 megapixel camera with 3264x2448 pixels, autofocus, smile shot mode and dual power LED flash support. The phone has a GPS chip inside and is able to use EXIF geotags on the photos which help in sorting pictures by location.

S8300 UltraTouch can manually or automatically upload pictures to Flickr, Picasa, Facebook and other services. The phone's camera records at 30fps, 720 x 480 resolution, and has 3 different compression modes. Samsung's popular touchscreen phone Omnia comes with a 5 megapixel camera, 7.2Mbps HSDPA connectivity, built-in GPS and Wi-Fi. Recently, Samsung launched its first 8 megapixel touchscreen phone, Pixon M8800, in India. Key features include GPS navigation, geo-tagging via the GPS chip that allows users to tag photos with geographic information, 30fps VGA video recording and HSDPA 7.2 Mbps.

The phone offers users a tweaked Touch Wiz interface with support for Mobile widgets as well. The Widgets can be dragged and placed on the screen for one-click access to favorite applications. There are preloaded Widgets such as Calendar, Calculator and Games. Users can also download Online Widgets like Google Search, CNN Mobile and more for instant updates. The updated TouchWiz user interface will feature 3D effects, new gesture controls and improved integration of photos and contacts.

The handset is capable of offering speedy Internet access, video telephony, streaming and multimedia services. The phone's video player can play all major video formats, including DivX at VGA (680 x 480 pixels) resolution and 1.5 Mbps bitrate. Samsung UltraTouch has a built-in accelerometer and switches between portrait and landscape mode automatically both in video and browsing modes. However, phone's music player lacks a standard 3.5mm headphone jack. As for memory, there is 80MB of onboard memory, with support for Micro SD cards up to 16GB. For connectivity, S8300 comes with microUSB and PC connectivity. With a battery capacity of 880mAh, the phone will support approximately 1.5 days.

Priced at Rs 27,500, the phone is now on sale in India. Samsung's first touchscreen phone Omnia retails for Rs 39,999 (32 GB Memory) and Rs 37,999 (24GB). Samsung's recently launched touchscreen phone, Pixon M8800, retails at Rs 28,750.

With hypnobirthing, it’s labour minus pain!

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The Times of India: Saloni Zutshi was terrified of labour just like any mother-to-be. But on November 4, she surprised herself when she gave birth to her first baby in a pain-free delivery. She is so thrilled she she wants to “do it all over again”. While this Delhi mother is extraordinary in wanting to repeat labour, she is also the first in the country to use hypnobirthing, a new technique that makes childbirth easier.

---Picture--- Hypno-therapist Divya Deswal (centre) holds baby Anaadyanta, flanked by her proud parents Saloni and Vasant Goel. The baby was born using hypnobirthing, a method which helps in an easy labour

The term ‘hypnobirthing’ may conjure up an image of a hypnotist standing in front of a hapless woman with a swinging pendulum. But it is actually a combination of relaxation, breathing and visualisation methods. Already popular in the West — celebrities such as Hollywood actress Jessica Alba have opted for it — the technique has just come to India. It is fast gaining ground. “Hypnobirthing is the use of self-hypnosis to achieve maximum relaxation, comfort and relief during childbirth,” explains Divya Deswal, the gynaecologist and certified hypno-therapist who handled Saloni’s delivery.

But didn’t Saloni and her husband have any reservations at all about using a method untried in India? Yes, at first, but their desire for a natural birth made them choose hypnobirthing. “Caesareans have become very common now but we wanted Saloni to have a natural birth. So when we heard about a hypnobirthing workshop in Mumbai, we attended and learnt about this new technique from Dr Deswal. But it was only after we read up on it and were confident that we said yes,” says Saloni’s husband and birthing partner Vasant Goel. The couple attended classes and were given books and tapes to practise at home. Deswal, who’s been certified by the Hypnobirthing Institute in New Hampshire, USA, admits that it took some time to convince the couple.

When the time came, Saloni stayed calm. “We had dimmed the lights and played soothing music as Vasant whispered the hypno prompts to her. After just three hours of labour, Saloni gave birth,” says Deswal. Success hinges on preparation so that when the time comes, a woman is actually looking forward to giving birth rather than dreading the pain. This is what happened with 28-year-old Saloni, who works as a researcher with the United Nations Development Programme on HIV/AIDS. “The technique is based on the power of suggestion,” Marie Mongan, founder-director of the Hypno-Birthing Institute. The method is based on English obstetrician Grantly Dick-Read’s 1944 manual ‘Childbirth Without Fear’. Dick-Read said that hypnosis during labour helps women break what he described as the “fear-tension-pain syndrome”. Once contractions start, fear kicks in as a reflex, causing blood to flow away from the uterus to muscles in the legs. The reduced blood flow causes the uterus to cramp, resulting in pain. So, if women could only relax, they would have less pain, more effective contractions and shorter labour.

Gynaecologists who use conventional delivery methods don’t seem averse. Such positive techniques can help check the rise in C-sections which more and more women are choosing over natural births as they get very stressed about labour and obstetricians don’t have the time and patience to address those fears. Hypnobirthing helped Vasant and Saloni tackle those fears and bring baby Anaadyanta into the world without pain. Could it herald the birth of a whole new order for Indian women?

Internet Terror - A bomb that can wipe off ALL info from computers

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Worldwide Web of Terror targets IT - Pakistan, Iraq Terror Groups Upload Manual on the Internet...

Consider a routine day at a BPO. At 10.30 am, several sharp, loud cracking sounds are heard within the main infocity campus, injuring none. Seconds later, you find the electronic systems totally dysfunctional. Your swipe card machine that authenticates your entry into the office stops working. So do the lifts and the computers and even the main data source gets completely erased.

If SIMI activists used ammonium nitrate bombs for the Ahmedabad blasts to cause physical damage, here’s more cause for alarm. Since August, terror organizations in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and Chechnya are circulating, on popular jihadi internet fora, various manuals to make Electromagenetic Pulse (EMP) bombs that wipe out data from computers!! A powerful radiation of electromagnetic waves generated as soon as an EMP, also known as an e-bomb, explodes while passing through any electronic gadget disables it. These bombs can be assembled locally and are aimed at crippling the IT backbone, as they can erase every byte of information in computers with a simple explosion.

One senior researcher had made one of the first references to these bombs and the threats they pose to the Indian IT centres in an article in the October 2000 issue of the Institute for Defence Studies and Strategic Analysis (IDSA). This was when Pakistan had started experimenting with EMP weapons. A CIA-supported internet watchdog, Search for International Terrorist Entities institute, raised an alarm on August 7 when it noticed the e- bomb manual circulating in jihadi fora supporting Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan and Chechnya movements.

The e-bomb is a military grade weapon and it is possible that their ‘dirty versions’ may have sneaked out in terror circles.

Source: Report published in the Sunday Times

Offshoring in Ho Chi Minh city (Vietnam) looks promising

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Luxoft, an IT provider based in Moscow, specializes in sophisticated application development work for companies such as The Boeing Co., Deutsche Bank AG and IBM. A relatively new company, Luxoft has tapped Russia's elite universities for top science talent and judiciously opening centers in Central and Eastern Europe. But when it went hunting for a spot in Asia for back-office help, it bypassed India and ventured to Vietnam, this week opening an office in Ho Chi Minh City.

"It is one of the best-kept secrets of Southeast Asia," said Peter Vaihansky, VP Marketing at Luxoft, ticking off its advantages. The total cost of labor here beats that of India and China by 10% to 15%, he said. Unlike India, where salaries continue to rise and turnover is pegged as high as 30% by some studies, the Vietnamese market is not overheated, Vaihansky said. Attrition there hovers below 10%. That's an important consideration for an offshore provider still building its brand image. "We cannot be a quality provider unless we can build stable teams that do not rotate half of their staffs every year. That is a very, very critical issue for us," Vaihansky said.

Vietnam may not yet be a hotbed for IT offshoring, but it isn't exactly a secret, either. Indeed, Vietnam earned an "excellent" for cost from Gartner, beating out China, India, Pakistan, the Philippines and Sri Lanka, which were judged "very good." But one Gartner analyst also noted that Vietnam came up short in other areas, ranking only "fair" on language skills and political and economic environment. Cost and risk correlate tightly, she noted. Still, the appetite for global outsourcing is driving more countries to market themselves as IT service destinations. The big news coming out of the Gartner report was not the fact that 30 countries met the firm's criteria as offshore destinations, but that an additional 13 countries just barely missed making the list.

Good cultural fit with Russia – Time for India to worry

For Luxoft, the appeal of Vietnam went beyond cost, Vaihansky said. Literacy levels are high in Vietnam. There are more than 70 colleges and universities in Ho Chi Minh City, he said, "and they teach good math there." The Vietnamese educational system "has borrowed" heavily from the former Soviet Union. Many older IT professionals were trained in Russia and speak Russian, as well as French.

"The outsourcing industry is different in Asia than in Russia. The educational DNA in Vietnam is much more in research and development and the science side of computer engineering," Vaihansky said, drawing a distinction between the Russian emphasis on high-level math and algorithmic training, and the technical IT skills found in abundance in India. "I'm not bashing India," he added, “but Vietnam is a good cultural fit for us, both in terms of establishing relationships with the authorities and jumping through the bureaucratic hoops to open our center."

For a company like Luxoft, cost has to be a big enticement, he said. "In India, a guy with seven years' experience, educated at an elite university, you can expect to pay $30,000 in U.S. dollars in salary. For that same guy in Vietnam -- good education, some work experience with an American company -- that rate plummets to $800 to $1,000 per month," Rodriguez said.