Month: June 2019

Enlarge (credit: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory [Public domain])

Graphics chip maker Nvidia is best known for consumer computing, vying with AMD's Radeon line for framerates and eye candy. But the venerable giant hasn't ignored the rise of GPU-powered applications that have little or nothing to do with gaming. In the early 2000s, UNC researcher Mark Harris began work popularizing the term "GPGPU," referencing the use of Graphics Processing Units for non-graphics-related tasks. But most of us didn't really become aware of the non-graphics-related possibilities until GPU-powered bitcoin-mining code was released in 2010, and shortly thereafter, strange boxes packed nearly solid with high-end gaming cards started popping up everywhere.

From digital currencies to supercomputing

The Association for Computing Machinery grants one or more $10,000 Gordon Bell Prize every year to a research team that has made a break-out achievement in performance, scale, or time-to-solution on challenging science and engineering problems. Five of the six entrants in 2018—including both winning teams, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory—used Nvidia GPUs in their supercomputing arrays; the Lawrence Berkeley team included six people from Nvidia itself.

In March of this year, Nvidia acquired Mellanox, makers of the high-performance network interconnect technology InfiniBand. (InfiniBand is frequently used as an alternative to Ethernet for massively high-speed connections between storage and compute stacks in enterprise, with real throughput up to 100Gbps.) This is the same technology the LBNL/Nvidia team used in 2018 to win a Gordon Bell Prize (with a project on deep learning for climate analytics).

Enlarge / The 10,000th Boeing 737, a MAX 8, was delivered to Southwest Airlines in March 2018. Southwest is a major customer for the 737 MAX 8. (credit: Stephen Brashear|Getty Images)

On Monday, Boeing's head of commercial aircraft, Kevin McAllister, apologized for the deaths of 346 people in a pair of recent airplane crashes. Speaking at the Paris Air Show, McAllister told a press conference that "we are very sorry for the loss of lives as a result of the tragic accidents," referring to the October 2018 crash of a Lion Air 737 Max into the Java Sea and the March 2019 crash of an Ethiopian Air 737 Max. "Our priority is doing everything to get this plane safely returned to service. It is a pivotal moment for all of us," he said.

Additionally, McAllister apologized to his airline customers. "I’m sorry for the disruption," he said. Air travel authorities around the world—including in the US, European Union, and China—have grounded Boeing 737 Max airliners while the company works to fix the problem.

The problem in this case is flight control software for the newest version of Boeing's venerable narrow-body jet. The first 737 took to the skies in 1966, and more than 10,000 have been built in the intervening years. But the 737s that now leave the factory in Renton, Washington, are very different when compared to those earlier models. Called the 737 Max, it was redesigned to compete with a more efficient rival airliner from Airbus. Boeing's tweaked plane gained FAA certification in March 2017.

Enlarge / It looks so peaceful up there. (credit: alxpin / Getty)

Welcome back to Ars on your Lunch Break! It’s been a while since we’ve done this, so I’ll start with a brief orientation. This series is built around the After On Podcast—which itself is a series of deep-dive interviews with thinkers, founders, and (above all) scientists.

Often exceeding 90 minutes, After On episodes run longer than the average busy Ars reader’s lunch break. So we carve these unhurried conversations into three to four 30-ish minute segments, and run ‘em here around lunch, Ars Daylight Time. You can access today’s segment via our embedded audio player, or by reading the accompanying transcript (both of which are below).

We’ve presented two seasons of these episodes so far and are planning a third one in the fall. As for this week’s run, it’s sort of a summer special. The impetus is a talk I gave at April’s annual TED conference, which TED will debut on their site’s front page tomorrow. I was asked to speak as a direct result of a two-part podcast interview I ran in late March. Some quick cocktail napkin math may tell you this gave me about 10 days to prepare my talk.

Enlarge (credit: Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)

Hot off the news of Huawei cancelling a laptop launch and delaying its foldable smartphone, we're now starting to see hard numbers for just how much the Trump Administration's export ban may affect the Chinese company's business. A report from Bloomberg claims to detail Huawei's internal estimates, saying the company is expecting a 40 to 60 percent drop in international smartphone shipments due to the export ban. Huawei does about half its smartphone business internationally, and with 206 million phones sold in total in 2018, this would work out to about 40 million to 60 million sales lost.

The Bloomberg report also has talk of Huawei pulling its next smartphone launch, the Honor 20, if sales aren't up to snuff. The phone launches on June 21 in parts of Europe, but the report says "executives are monitoring the launch and may cut off shipments if it sells poorly as expected." Carriers also need to be considered in this equation, and the report notes that two of the largest carriers in France have already opted out of selling the device.

This morning Huawei sent a response to the report to Ars and other outlets, saying the Honor 20 launch was still on schedule for June 21, and the Honor 20 Pro would be available in overseas markets "soon."