Why do we remember the past, but not the future? It seems like a silly question, but for some scientists, it’s a deep mystery wrapped up in physics and perception.
The mystery takes another twist in a study appearing in the same journal that published Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity more than a century ago.
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s your Uber ride arriving to take you to work.
Uber is researching how to offer customers short-haul flights on vertical-takeoff aircraft in future, the ride-hailing company’s Product Head Jeff Holden told a a Recode reporter on stage at the Nantucket Conference on Sunday.
Holden said the company is looking into drone-like aircraft, “so we can someday offer our customers as many options as possible to move around.”
Continue reading “Uber researches vertical-takeoff planes for short-haul city rides” »
What is good for the simulation and the machine learning is, as it turns out, also good for the database. The performance and thermal limits of traditional CPUs have made GPUs the go-to accelerator for these workloads at extreme scale, and now databases, which are thread monsters in their own right, are also turning to GPUs to get a performance and scale boost.
Commercializing GPU databases takes time, and Kinetica, formerly known as GPUdb, is making a bit of a splash ahead of the Strata+Hadoop World conference next week as it brags about the performance and scale of the parallel database management system that it initially created for the US Army and has commercialized with the US Postal Service.
Kinetica joins MapD, which we profiled recently, and Sqream Technologies, which you can find out more about here, in using GPUs to execute the parallel functions of SQL queries to massively speed up the processing of queries against databases. Each of these GPU databases has come into being through a unique path, just like the pillars of the relational database world – Oracle’s eponymous database, IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server (and its Sybase forbear), MySQL, and PostgreSQL – did decades ago. And as these GPU databases mature and develop, the race will be on to scale them up and out to handle ever larger datasets and perform queries faster and faster at the same time.
Continue reading “Pushing Database Scalability Up And Out With GPUs” »
This is the question tackled by theoretical physicists working on quantum gravity by creating models attempting to reconcile gravity and quantum mechanics.
Some of these models predict that spacetime at the Planck scale (10^-33cm) is no longer continuous — as held by classical physics — but discrete in nature.
Just like the solids or fluids we come into contact with every day, which can be seen as made up of atoms and molecules when observed at sufficient resolution. A structure of this kind generally implies, at very high energies, violations of Einstein’s special relativity (a integral part of general relativity).
