castanyes blaves

A supercomputing architecture that first appeared in prototype form more than 10 years ago has been given a new lease on life, thanks in part to a recent $4 million Department of Defense grant issued to seed the new Center for Adaptive Supercomputing Software. The joint project teams up Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and supercomputer maker Cray, as well as several institutions including Georgia Institute of Technology and Sandia National Laboratories.

The initiative aims to develop software that takes advantage of the multithreaded processing capabilities of Cray's XMT supercomputer.

Dubbed Magalhaes (Magellan), the laptops will have on board low-power Intel Atom chips designed for laptops. They will also sport digital cameras and a broadband net connection.

As an operating system, the machines will run a version of Linux developed in Venezuela.

On 23 September the US arm of operator T-Mobile is expected to whisk the cloth off the first handset running Google's Android operating system for mobiles.

VMware Fusion 2.0 goes final: free update to existing users

Report: Apple now sixth among worldwide PC manufacturers

By David Chartier | Published: September 13, 2008 - 12:08PM CT

Riding the wave of good news about Apple's explosive growth over the past years, market research firm Gartner now says that Apple is the sixth largest PC manufacturer in the world.

Challenge to iPhone heats up

By Andrew Parker in London and Paul Taylor in New York

Published: September 22 2008 23:30 | Last updated: September 22 2008 23:30

The battle to dominate the mobile smartphone market is about to heat up with the launch of long-awaited handsets by Google, Nokia and Sony Ericsson.

On Tuesday, Google is due to unveil the first smartphone powered by the internet search company’s Android operating system.

Scientists have hailed a successful switch-on for an enormous experiment which will recreate the conditions a few moments after the Big Bang.

Single-nucleotide mutation rate increases close to insertions/deletions in eukaryotes

Germany leads 'clean coal' pilot

Phylogenetic Inference Using Whole Genomes

Bruce Rannala1 and ­Ziheng Yang2­
1Genome Center and Department of Evolution and Ecology, University of California, Davis, California 95616; email: bhrannala@ucdavis.edu
2Department of Biology, University College London, London WC1E 6BT United Kingdom; Laboratory of Biometrics, Graduate School of Agriculture and Life Sciences, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan; email: z.yang@ucl.ac.uk

The availability of genome-wide data provides unprecedented opportunities for resolving difficult phylogenetic relationships and for studying population genetic processes of mutation, selection, and recombination on a genomic scale. The use of appropriate statistical models becomes increasingly important when we are faced with very large datasets, which can lead to improved precision but not necessarily improved accuracy if the analytical methods have systematic biases. This review provides a critical examination of methods for analyzing genomic datasets from multiple loci, including concatenation, separate gene-by-gene analyses, and statistical models that accommodate heterogeneity in different aspects of the evolutionary process among data partitions. We discuss factors that may cause the gene tree to differ from the species tree, as well as strategies for estimating species phylogenies in the presence of gene tree conflicts. Genomic datasets provide computational and statistical challenges that are likely to be a focus of research for years to come.