More iTunes for You

UC Berkeley (CA) has joined a small but growing number of schools distributing video and audio recordings of course lectures and other content through Apple Computer’s iTunes Music Store. It is also the first site to make all of its iTunes U content available publicly. “Berkeley on iTunes U” is open not only to Berkeley students and staff, but also to the general public.

The site is a natural expansion of UC Berkeley’s podcasting services, and it follows a Berkeleyesque tradition of openness. The university’s Educational Technology Services (ETS) division began its Web casts of lectures and special events both to students and the public back in 2001. ETS started podcasting course lectures last year, and faculty participation is on the rise. Typical Berkeley podcast courses include "Foundations of American Cyberculture," "Introduction to Chemistry," "Wildlife Ecology," and "Introductory Physics." Users can either subscribe to receive the latest course updates automatically, or browse and download individual files. Berkeley on iTunes U has subscribers worldwide.

High Performance Installation

HPC means not only fast computing but also rapid deployment at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. The university’s new supercomputer, dubbed TSUBAME, was up and running in less than a month, one of the shortest times on record for a world-class HPC installation.

NEC is the primary systems integrator, responsible for design of the infrastructure as well as the integration of applications. The system is based on Sun Fire x64 servers with 10,480 AMD Opteron processor cores and Sun storage technologies.

Tokyo Tech has reported a sustained performance of 38.18 trillion floating point operations per second (TeraFLOPS) in early Linpack benchmarks. With more than 21 Terabytes of memory and 1.1 Petabytes of disk storage, the system is expected to be included as one of the ten largest supercomputers in the world when the Top500 list is released in June.