Informatics

Alan Turing statue in Sackville Park in Manchester

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The mathematician and computer scientist Alan Mathison Turing was born on June 23, 1912 in London, England. He’s one of the fathers of computer science and in particular of artificial intelligence. During World War II he worked on deciphering German secret codes.

Some racks of the IBM Sequoia supercomputer

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The Sequoia supercomputer, which uses Linux as its operating system, is based on the Blue Gene/Q architecture, the latest version of the architecture developed by IBM exactly to build supercomputers. Sequoia uses Power BQC processors with 16 cores clocked at 1.6 GHz stacked in 96 racks. The total number of cores is 1,572,864 for a total computing capacity of 16,324.8 TeraFlops. It has 1,572,864 GBytes (nearly 1.6 PetaBytes) of memory.

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Bethesda Softworks, a publisher specializing in videogames owned by ZeniMax Media Inc. which also owns videogame producer id Software, announced that Doom 3 will be published this fall in the BFG Edition, a new commemorative edition of the entire legendary saga of Doom. This edition will in fact contain Doom, Doom ][, and Doom 3 and the Resurrection of Evil expansion pack with new 7 levels titled “The Lost Mission”.

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Facebook’s shares simply can’t seem to be succeessful and on Tuesday they closed at $31, 18% less than their $38 initial offer from last Friday. After a lot of speculations, however, it looks like there will also be an official investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) – the authority that monitors the stock market – and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authorithy (FINRA), a private organization that however has some authority in the management of financial exchanges.