Microsoft's underwater Data Center
Credit: Microsoft
Microsoft waterproof data center has 864 servers up on 12 racks and it was placed 100 feet beneath the ocean surface near Orkney Islands in Scotland. The benefits of an underwater data center is plenty. The main one is the natural cooling for the water. Another one is the protection for natural disasters such as hurricanes or wars.
Microsoft will watch closely the performance of the data center before thinking about deploying another one.
IBM and DoE announced the world's fastest supercomputer
Credit: Oak Ridge National Laboratory
IBM, in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory revealed Summit, the new fastest supercomputer in the world. The computer is capable of 200,000 trillion calculations per second, which will accordingly put it in the first place of the Top 500 supercomputers list when it will be published. US haven't taken the top spot on the list since 2012.
The system which is in works for a few years is comprised of the following specs:
- 4,608 compute servers
- Two 22-core IBM Power9 chips / per server
- Six Nvidia Tesla V100 GPUs / per server
- 10 petabytes of memory
The system is designed to run machine and deep learning applications that have huge demands in power. It is also possible with those huge amounts of memory to analyze massive datasets and create intelligent software to accelerate the pace of discovery.
Tesla to enable more self-driving features
Elon Musk announced that the next version of Autopilot will be released in August. That release will begin to enable full self-driving features.
With all the accidents that happened recently it is unknown if it is a good idea to proceed right now.
The full self-driving hardware which cost an addition $8,000 includes:
- 8 surround cameras provide 360 degree visibility around the car at up to 250 meters of range
- 12 updated ultrasonic sensors complement this vision, allowing for detection of both hard and soft objects at nearly twice the distance of the prior system
- 1 forward-facing radar with enhanced processing provides additional data about the world on a redundant wavelength, capable of seeing through heavy rain, fog, dust and even the car ahead
Elon claims that this hardware is capable of full level 5 autonomy to a car, which means total driving autonomy.
Binance opens bank account in Malta
Binance, world's top crypto exchange, opened a bank account in Malta. This is the first step for their plans to offer fiat-to-crypto deposits and withdrawals on their platform. Changpeng Zhao, the CEO and founder said that this is a significant development for their goal. Plans is to launch this feature within the year and also expand in Uganda and Asia as well.
Bitcoin is now considered an Asset
According to the South Korea's Supreme Court, Bitcoin is a legally recognizable asset. This decision overturned the previsious decision by a lower court from last year.
The ruling was done after a seller of child pornography was sentenced in prison, but not confiscated of the Bitcoins he gained from those illegal activities (cause Bitcoin was not considered a valuable tangible object). The new ruling said that hidden assets can also be intangible objects that hold value such as Bitcoin, cause it is traded on exchanges. Now, his time in prison will remain the same but he has to forfeit the Bitcoins from the illegal activities.
More sex workers saving into crypto
According to CoinDesk, many sex workers are getting payed in crypto as its nature is more anonymous of course than credit cards. Besides that, many sex workers were not capable of getting mainstream financial services in the US, cause most banks consider sex workers a high risk.
The future of exchange is not making sure if this isn't going to happen to them too. So the sex workers are moving their crypto assets offline, to cold storage methods they control.
Have a great week! - Chris Myll
