Tuesday, December 18, 2007

sQuba: TheWorld's First Real Diving Car

sQuba Diving Car
It has been 30 years since we first saw James Bond in his Lotus Esprit Submarine in “The Spy Who Loved Me” which sent our imaginations into overdrive, and now Rinspeed boss Frank M. Rinderknecht has realised a long cherished dream with the creation of their latest concept named “sQuba”.
Swiss design company Rinspeed is known for its eccentric concepts, including last year's translucent eXasis Concept and the "Splash" hydrofoil car that set a speed record crossing the English Channel.


Rinspeed is once again turning to the water for its latest concept, although this time they will be heading below the surface instead of skimming above it. Set to debut at the 2008 Geneva Motor Show (March 6th thru 16th, 2008), the sQuba concept is the world's first diving car, according to the company, and can be submerged up to 10 meters below the surface.


An electric motor provides power to the rear wheels as well as two propellers and dual jet drives, and a futuristic cockpit comes with its own supply of oxygen. Like many of Rinspeed's other unique creations, the sQuba will only remain a one-off and there are no plans for production. The press release from Rinspeed can be seen after the jump, and two not-so-real photos can be viewed in the gallery.

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

NEC SX-9: The Most Powerful and Fastest Supercomputer


Suffered from using a low-speed processor computer? It's time to upgrade now. Japan’s NEC introduced the SX-9 this week, the world’s most powerful and fastest supercomputer.


Just one core is capable of over 102 gigaflops; a single node of 16 CPUs generates up to 1.6 teraflops (trillion operations) while a full cluster of nodes produces 839 teraflops, NEC claims. The SZ-9 is also able to handle especially large data sets with a shared memory of 1TB as well as 128GB per second transfers all processors in the system.


Although faster than previous SX systems, the technology is also considerably smaller and easier to run. NEC expects the supercomputer to be used for large institutions and companies for tasks that can also help the environment, such as modeling weather patterns or engineering nanotechnology.via