Day: December 9, 2017

NVIDIA’s ‘most powerful GPU’ ever is built for AI

NVIDIA’s newest Titan GPU is now available for purchase, and the company says it’s the “world’s most powerful GPU for the PC” yet. The GPU-maker has launched the Volta-powered Titan V at the annual Neural Information Processing Systems conference. Volta is NVIDIA’s latest microarchitecture designed to double the energy efficiency of its predecessor, and Titan V can apparently deliver 110 teraflops of raw horsepower or around 9 times what the previous Titan is capable of. This powerful new GPU’s target? Scientists and researchers working on AI, deep learning and high performance computing. Since Volta was designed to work on a mixture of computation and calculations and has features created specifically for deep learning, scientists can use the GPU to build their own desktop PCs if they don’t need special servers. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said during the event: “Our vision for Volta was to push the outer limits of high performance computing and AI. We broke new ground with its new processor architecture, instructions, numerical formats, memory architecture and processor links. With TITAN V, we are putting Volta into the hands of researchers and scientists all over the world. I can’t wait to see their breakthrough discoveries.” Those scientists and researchers probably need the backing of their educational institutions and donors to build computers with Titan V, though. The GPU, which is now available from NVIDIA’s website and retailers, will set them back $2, 999. Source: NVIDIA

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NVIDIA’s ‘most powerful GPU’ ever is built for AI

Marvel comics arrive in Hoopla’s public library app

Comic books are a brilliant medium, but keeping up with the latest releases can be expensive. If you live in the US, it’s worth checking out Hoopla ; the service is supported by more than 1, 500 public libraries, and offers free digital access to DC, Image and IDW titles. And starting today, another major publisher is joining the platform: Marvel . More than 250 collections and graphic novels will be available, including Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet book one — by author, journalist and comic book writer Ta-Nehisi Paul Coates — Civil War and X-Men: The Dark Pheonix Saga . There’s a handy map here that shows all of the Hoopla-supported libraries in the US. As Variety explains , the libraries set their own lending limits, so you might be able to check out five or 10 at a time through the app. You won’t, of course, get every new Marvel release, but it’s a good place to start if you’re unsure which characters or series to follow. Hoopla says there should be plenty of familiar faces from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, including Spider-Man , Daredevil , The Runaways , The Avengers and the Guardians of the Galaxy . As Luke Cage would say: Sweet Christmas… Via: Variety Source: Hoopla (Press Release)

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Marvel comics arrive in Hoopla’s public library app

Zimbabwe’s Internet Went Down for About Five Hours. The Culprit Was Reportedly a Tractor.

Zimbabweans lost internet access en masse on Tuesday when a tractor reportedly cut through key fiber-optic cables in South Africa and another internet provider experienced simultaneous issues with its primary internet conduits. From a report: The outage began shortly before noon local time and persisted for more than five hours, affecting not only citizens’ day-to-day internet usage but businesses that rely upon web access. And while five internet-free hours might sound unfathomable to those of us accustomed to having the web constantly at our fingertips, large-scale internet outages — from inadvertent lapses caused by ship anchors to government-calculated blackouts designed to showcase political power — do happen, and maybe more frequently than you’d thought. According to local news sources, a tractor in South Africa damaged cables belonging to Liquid Telecom, which has an 81.5 percent market share of Zimbabwe’s international-equipped internet bandwidth as of the second quarter of 2017 and leases capacity to other internet providers. In a bad coincidence, city council employees in Kuwadzana, a suburb of Zimbabwe’s capitol city of Harare, cut an additional TelOne cable around the same time. (According to NewsDay Zimbabwe, it was an accident. The company blamed “faults that occurred on our main links through South Africa and Botswana” in a statement.) Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Zimbabwe’s Internet Went Down for About Five Hours. The Culprit Was Reportedly a Tractor.