Google Launches Voter Info Tool

In a post on the Official Google Blog, the company has announced the availability of a new Voter Information Tool.   Obviously, its main current focus is on the upcoming US presidential election, but there is information on other countries as well.  I’ll focus on the US content, since that’s the part I know a little about.

The tool offers a Google Maps style lookup for your polling place, given your address as a registered voter.  In Virginia, where I live, this currently doesn’t produce anything useful; I suspect this is because, in Virginia, polling places are assigned by the local (county) Board of Elections, and Google hasn’t incorporated all that information.  It also shows a ballot summary of all the candidates, and their party affiliations, for the national election races (in this case, the races for President, one US Senator, and US Representative).  Once I had put in my address, it located me in the right election district without any trouble.   Helpfully, it gives the address, phone number, and Web link for the local Board of Elections, and also has links to candidates’ Web sites, and other sources of election information.

The tool, which is open-source, can be embedded on another Web site if desired; there is also a Civic Information API that can be used to develop new applications.

Mozilla Releases Thunderbird 16.0.2

Mozilla has released an updated version, 16.0.2, of its Thunderbird E-mail client for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.  This update fixes a bug that affected mail retrieval from IMAP accounts, as well as two security vulnerabilities (one of which is the same Critical vulnerability fixed earlier in Firefox 16.0.2).  More details are available in the Release Notes.

You can get the new version via the built-in update mechanism (Help / About Thunderbird / Check for Updates), or you can get a complete installation package from the download page.

Oak Ridge Powers Up Titan

The US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory [ORNL] announced the start-up of a new supercomputer, called Titan, today.   The new machine, which is likely to displace the Sequoia computer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as the world’s fastest supercomputer, has been in the works for two years.

Performance of these systems is ranked based on their speed in floating-point operations per second (FLOP/s), measured on the LINPACK benchmark, which involves the solution of a dense system of linear equations.  The Sequoia, ranked fastest in the world in June of this year, achieved over 16 petaflops (1.6 × 10¹⁶ flops); the new Titan system is rated at 27 petaflops (2.7 × 10¹⁶ flops).

The Titan system uses a hybrid architecture that includes both conventional 16-core Opteron 6274 CPUs, and NVIDIA Tesla K-20 GPUs.  It has a total of 18,688 compute nodes, each containing a GPU and a CPU, for a total of 299.008 CPU cores.  The system also has more than 700 terabytes ( 7 × 10¹⁴ bytes) of memory.  (Apparently 640KB is no longer enough for anyone.)  The hybrid architecture results in better energy efficiency; Titan gets about ten times the performance of its predecessor at ORNL, the Jaguar, at less than 30% more electricity consumption.  It is, however, rather large, requiring 4,352 square feet of floor space.

James Hack, Director of ORNL’s National Center for Computational Sciences, said “Titan will allow scientists to simulate physical systems more realistically and in far greater detail. The improvements in simulation fidelity will accelerate progress in a wide range of research areas such as alternative energy and energy efficiency, the identification and development of novel and useful materials and the opportunity for more advanced climate projections.”

The ORNL press release is here.

Internet Archive Celebrates 10 Petabytes

The Internet Archive, a non-profit organization dedicated to creating a digital archive and library of Internet content, has just celebrated its collection reaching 10 petabytes (10,000,000,000,000,000, or 1.0×10¹⁶ bytes).   The collection contains approximately 150 billion historical Web pages, as well as texts, images, audio, and video.  The Internet Archive provides the Wayback Machine to allow retrieval of archived pages, as well as more general search tools.

The Internet Archive also announced the availability, for research purposes, of 80-terabytes (8.0×10¹³ bytes) of archived Web crawl data from 2011.  The data set characteristics are:

• Crawl start date: 09 March, 2011
• Crawl end date: 23 December, 2011
• Number of captures: 2,713,676,341
• Number of unique URLs: 2,273,840,159
• Number of hosts: 29,032,069

Interested researchers can get in touch with the Archive to arrange access.

If you would like access to this set of crawl data, please contact us at info at archive dot org and let us know who you are and what you’re hoping to do with it.  We may not be able to say “yes” to all requests, since we’re just figuring out whether this is a good idea, but everyone will be considered.

The San Francisco Chronicle recently had a front-page profile of the Internet Archive and its founder, Brewster Kahle.

Mozilla Updates Firefox to 16.0.2

Mozilla has released a new version of its Firefox browser, 16.0.2., for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.  This update fixes a single security vulnerability with Location objects, which  Mozilla rates as Critical.   The Release Notes have been updated to reflect this change.

You can get a copy of the new version via the built-in update mechanism (Help / About Firefox / Check for Updates), or you can get an installation package from the downloads page.

Raspberry Pi Gets More Open Code

Today, in a post on its Web site, the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced that the source code for the video drivers used in its $35 single-board Linux computer would be available under an open-source license.

As of right now, all of the VideoCore driver code which runs on the ARM is available under a FOSS license (3-Clause BSD to be precise).

According to Alex Bradbury, author of the post and lead Linux developer at the Foundation, all the software running on the Pi’s ARM processor is now open source.  (The post has a link to the source repository.)

This development will please advocates of free and open-source software.  It should also make it easier for developers to make use of the graphics acceleration capability that is part of the Pi, including those who are porting various OS environments to the device.

We’ve been excitedly following the progress of FreeBSD, NetBSD, Plan9, RISC OS, Haiku and others. All these projects could now potentially port these libraries and make use of the full hardware accelerated graphics facilities of the Raspberry Pi.

I have seen some grousing that some of the code that runs on the graphics chip itself has not been open-sourced.  I don’t know enough about the hardware to evaluate this claim, but it seems to me that half a loaf is preferable to none, especially since the original goal of the Raspberry Pi project was largely educational.  In any case, Broadcom, the chip vendor, has taken a significant step in the direction of openness, and deserves credit for that.

Ars Technica also has an article on this announcement.