banzainetsurfer has added a photo to the pool:
The heightened rhetoric from Pyongyang has left analysts asking why North Korea appears to need so many nuclear weapons
At a ruling Workers’ party meeting that concluded this week, Kim Jong-un declared that steadily expanding North Korea’s nuclear forces was the “most correct and unique way” to cope with an increasingly unstable world, citing what he described as growing threats from the US and its allies.
The remarks were just the latest in a recent stream of commentary from North Korea’s leadership that has seen Kim pledge to equip warships with nuclear missiles, double weapons grade production and expand the country’s nuclear arsenal at “an exponential rate”.
Continue reading...Rail bridge and power plant among latest infrastructure targeted by Kyiv in Crimea, where restrictions on public life have come to prevail. What we know on day 1,582
Continue reading...The Boston consensus appeared to be that the city centre hadn’t been so lively in years. Miami has its turn now
“It’s hot, too hot. Very, very hot,” says Clark from Dalkeith, who is standing on a sidewalk in Miami. “I want a wee Arctic blast for about half an hour to calm down.”
We’re outside the Auld Dubliner in downtown, where a number of Scots have gathered to watch the England game and apparently not for reasons of schadenfreude (at least not initially). The mood is upbeat, there are locals arriving to share the vibe, and nobody appears to have tired of drinking just yet.
Continue reading...On the night when a 40-year-old Luka Modric became the fourth member of the sport’s ultra-exclusive 200-cap club on the men’s side for Croatia, Ante Budimir rescued their World Cup campaign with the only goal of a tight match.
It was the solitary goal scored all day in Group L and puts Zlatko Dalic’s side a point behind England and Ghana. Panama, meanwhile, are eliminated and have yet to secure a point in five World Cup matches between the 2018 edition and this one.
Continue reading...China’s LineShine debuts at number one in Top500 – a list sometimes viewed as a national measure of global tech prowess
A supercomputer in China now outranks its US counterparts as the world’s most powerful. It is the first time since 2017 that a Chinese computer has topped a list sometimes viewed as a measure of a nation’s technological prowess.
The LineShine computer in Shenzhen displaced top-ranked US computer El Capitan in the Top500 rankings released on Tuesday. It was LineShine’s debut on the list.
Continue reading...
SpaceCadet37 has added a photo to the pool:
Yesterday, flying above Mahon Rock Pool, I was reminded that perspective changes everything.
From the ground, you see a rock pool.
From above, you see a masterpiece shaped by time, nature, and patience.
A good reminder that some of life's greatest lessons reveal themselves when we rise above the noise.
SpaceCadet37 has added a photo to the pool:
Yesterday, flying above Mahon Rock Pool, I was reminded that perspective changes everything.
From the ground, you see a rock pool.
From above, you see a masterpiece shaped by time, nature, and patience.
A good reminder that some of life's greatest lessons reveal themselves when we rise above the noise.
Longtime Slashdot reader hackingbear shares a report from TOP500: The 67th edition of the TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers was announced today at the ISC 2026 conference in Hamburg, Germany. LineShine, a previously unlisted system installed in China, debuts at No. 1, displacing El Capitan as the world's most powerful supercomputer as measured by the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark. LineShine achieved 2.198 Exaflop/s on HPL -- about 80 percent of its 2.736 Exaflop/s theoretical peak -- making it the first system on the TOP500 to exceed two exaflops of sustained double-precision performance using CPUs only.
Installed at the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen (NSCS) and built by the Shenzhen Cloud Computing Center, the system is based on a custom Chinese processor and the "LingKun" platform: 13.79 million cores across 304-core LX2 processors running at 1.55 GHz, linked by the proprietary LingQi interconnect and running Kylin OS. LineShine draws approximately 42.2 megawatts of power, for an efficiency of 52.07 Gigaflops/Watt. Its debut marks the first time since 2017 that a Chinese system has led the TOP500, and it also takes over the No. 1 position on the HPCG ranking with 22.00 HPCG-Petaflop/s. On the HPL-MxP mixed-precision benchmark, LineShine reached 7.92 Exaflop/s for fourth place, a comparatively modest 3.6x speedup over its HPL score that points to a CPU-only design without dedicated low-precision accelerators. While impressive, "the results may say more about Beijing's desire to show self-sufficiency in computing systems than its standing in the global AI race," reports Reuters.
Reuters interviewed tech and policy experts who said that the results "do not mean that China has the world's fastest computer for AI work because of changes in the computing industry in recent years and the methods used to compile the list." The reports notes that LineShine "ranked fourth on a benchmark test designed to simulate computing work that is more similar to AI."
Jimmy Goodrich, a senior fellow at the University of California's Institute for Global Conflict and Cooperation, said: "If the hyperscalers submitted their systems, this 'world's fastest' would not crack the top five." Addison Snell, CEO of Intersect360 Research, a firm that focuses on supercomputers, added: "I'm not surprised it's the number one system. What I'm surprised by is that they submitted it and want recognition for it."
Installed at the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen (NSCS) and built by the Shenzhen Cloud Computing Center, the system is based on a custom Chinese processor and the "LingKun" platform: 13.79 million cores across 304-core LX2 processors running at 1.55 GHz, linked by the proprietary LingQi interconnect and running Kylin OS. LineShine draws approximately 42.2 megawatts of power, for an efficiency of 52.07 Gigaflops/Watt. Its debut marks the first time since 2017 that a Chinese system has led the TOP500, and it also takes over the No. 1 position on the HPCG ranking with 22.00 HPCG-Petaflop/s. On the HPL-MxP mixed-precision benchmark, LineShine reached 7.92 Exaflop/s for fourth place, a comparatively modest 3.6x speedup over its HPL score that points to a CPU-only design without dedicated low-precision accelerators. While impressive, "the results may say more about Beijing's desire to show self-sufficiency in computing systems than its standing in the global AI race," reports Reuters.
Reuters interviewed tech and policy experts who said that the results "do not mean that China has the world's fastest computer for AI work because of changes in the computing industry in recent years and the methods used to compile the list." The reports notes that LineShine "ranked fourth on a benchmark test designed to simulate computing work that is more similar to AI."
Jimmy Goodrich, a senior fellow at the University of California's Institute for Global Conflict and Cooperation, said: "If the hyperscalers submitted their systems, this 'world's fastest' would not crack the top five." Addison Snell, CEO of Intersect360 Research, a firm that focuses on supercomputers, added: "I'm not surprised it's the number one system. What I'm surprised by is that they submitted it and want recognition for it."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.