Showing posts with label world. Show all posts
Showing posts with label world. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Updated: 15 best graphics cards in the world today

3:57 AM Tech Plus

The PC is lining up for a brilliant year. It's already been highlighted as the platform of choice for for the likes of Bulletstorm, Crysis 2 and Dragon Age 2 to name but a few. And as the consoles stagnate due to their ageing technology, it's something that's only set to continue.

In order to experience such games at their best though, you're going to need to ensure you have a machine that's up to the task. And by machine we're primarily focusing on your graphics card.

So welcome to our best graphics card article - it's constantly updated with the very latest best graphics cards.

It's the graphics card that does the serious work when it comes to rendering your games, and the more effects and higher resolutions you throw at it, the more is asked of that graphics card.

It's important to pick your graphics card so that it works well with your display, or displays. There's no point for instance, trying to power a 30-inch screen with the likes of a GeForce GTS 450. By the same notion, running a standard 20-inch screen with the likes of Radeon HD 6990 won't begin to tap into the cards power.

As a quick rule of thumb, whatever you spent on your screen, you're going to want to spend a similar amount to power it. Roughly.

The question is, which one of the many graphics cards out there should you actually spend your hard earned cash on? Here TechRadar highlights the top fifteen cards worth considering. We cover the notable cards from the last generation, the best all-rounders for most PC gamers, and the £550 monsters that can handle multi-screen outputs.

In this guide though we'll let you know what's hot, what's cool and what the fastest GPUs available right now and worthy of your time are.

Best of all, because we're now enjoying the second generation of DirectX 11 hardware, every card we look at here is capable of rendering the latest, funkiest DirectX 11 games.

So how does your graphics card stand in our countdown, and is it time for an upgrade? Well, there's only one way to find out…

ATI radeon hd 5970

There are a lot of terms and acronyms that get bandied around when talking about graphics cards, and not a lot of explanation to go along with them.

Before we delve into the meat of the feature let's take a minute to clear things up a little.

GPU - This is the graphics processing unit, the chip at the heart of the graphics card. Many cards use the same GPU but partner it with different components and at different clockspeeds to produce slower or faster graphics cards.

GDDR - Graphics Double Data Rate memory is the specific kind of memory that is used on graphics cards.

ROPs - The Render Output unit comes into play during the final stages in the rendering process, bringing together the data from each of the memory buffers in the graphics card's local memory. The more of them you have, the better off you are.

CUDA - The Compute Unified Device Architecture is a coding language Nvidia invented to allow parallel computing on its range of GPUs. From its 8 series upwards all its cards can use CUDA to speed up parallel processing applications, such as video encoding, in a faster way than your computer's CPU.

PhysX - Originally an accelerator chip and software layer from the small company Ageia, Nvidia bought up PhysX and has now applied it to its GPUs, again from the 8 series forward. It allows for more advanced physics simulations, such as liquid or cloth, in games that have been coded with the PhysX software included.

Crossfire and SLI - These are the relevant multi-GPU configurations from both AMD and Nvidia. Both allow multiple graphics cards to be connected together to increase the rendering performance. Historically this has been fraught with driver issues and diminishing returns for the extra cards, but as the latest cards have been released we are getting closer to doubling the performance by adding in a second card.

PCB - The Printed Circuit Board is the physical board that graphics cards (and all other micro-electronics) have their components attached to. The boards are printed with conductive pathways between the relevant components instead of using physical wires.

DirectX - Microsoft's DirectX is a collection of its own proprietary APIs (application programming interfaces) for dealing with multimedia tasks on its own operating systems. The Direct3D part is specifically to do with 3D graphics and utilises hardware acceleration if there is a GPU in place to take advantage of it.

Tesselation - This is one of the key buzzwords to come from Microsoft's latest graphical API, DirectX 11. Essentially it is designed to add extra geometry to a simple polygon using displacement maps to tell the GPU where to raise and lower parts of the polygon as the graphics card computes the data. The idea being to add geometry to objects in a game world without significantly impairing performance and it is set to become a key battleground in the graphics war in the coming years.

The first generation of DirectX 11 graphics cards boasted some notable GPUs. Here's are low-down of the cards that still manage to be relevant even after the second slew of cards settles in:

5. Nvidia GeForce GTS 450 (£85)

Best graphics cards

If 1680 x 1050 is the mass-market gaming resolution of choice, then the GTS 450 is opium for the masses.

This tiny powerhouse (well, it's still dual-width, but pleasingly short) is capable of feats beyond its £80-£90 price tag. What's more, in SLI, you'll see massive performance gains, making the dual-card upgrade path a realistic and impressive option for budget systems.

The basic GeForce GTS 450 is, architecturally, about half of a GeForce 460 with a higher clockspeed and a narrower memory bus.

However, the GTS 450 has the advantage over the GTX 460 of being smaller and requiring less power, which makes it a strong candidate for that SLI set-up

It is, however, now pitched directly up against the HD 5750 in pricing terms thanks to the on-going Nvidia/AMD graphics card price wars. And that is a card the GTS 450 happily beats into submission in any benchmark you throw at it.

4. AMD Radeon HD 5770 (£100)

best graphics cards

For budget-conscious gamers, the HD 5770 should be a serious consideration. Have a scout around the online retailers, and you'll see that examples can be had for less than £100 now.

Offering competent performance at the mainstream 22-inch resolution of 1680 x 1050, it also comes with the promise of cool-running, quiet operation – a trademark of AMD's last-gen design philosophy.

However, try to crank the shinier graphical elements – such as Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering – too high, and the card starts to run out of grunt.

AMD's EyeFinity technology, which enables multi-screen scaling, is a very real option with the 5770, though we wouldn't recommend the 5770 for multi-screen gaming; it just doesn't have the throughput for gaming at huge resolutions.

But the really interesting thing about the HD 5770 is what its price represents. At these low prices, our thoughts turn to CrossFire setups. For under £200, you can net yourself a twin-card setup that offers kick-ass performance at mid-range resolutions.

If you're content with that 22-inch monitor and want zingy performance on a budget, this CF setup is probably the cheapest way to achieve it... Oh, and did we mention the 5770 is DX11 capable? Yum.

3. Nvidia GeForce GTX 470 (£160)

best graphics card

Not so hot on the heels of Nvidia's first DX11 graphics cards came the GeForce GTX 470, a cut-down version of the GF100 GPU the green company is rightfully proud of.

Given the larger pricetag of its big brother, the GTX 480, this represents the most affordable high-end Fermi card of the first generation.

Like the rest of the Fermi range, the 470 has seen some nifty price-cuts, which means it can now be had for £160. This makes the cheapest 470s at just £30 more expensive than the GTX 460 1GB, the new midrange king. That makes it a pretty compelling prospect right now.

In addition, at the native 22-inch resolution of 1680 x 1050, this card is a fair way ahead of the HD 5870. When things get cranked up though, it starts to lose its competitive edge against AMD's upper-midrange peer.

Indeed, in our World in Conflict benchmark it actually dropped behind. Still, thanks to its Fermi roots, the GTX 470 has still got the tessellation goods and this promises some future-proofing.

This card has been superseded by the likes of the GTX 560 Ti though, which means that it's not going to get replaced once stock levels do become exhausted. Worth considering while you can find it, though.

2. AMD Radeon HD 5850 (£140)

best graphics cards

The Radeon HD 5850 came out shortly after AMD's flagship DirectX 11 graphics card, the Radeon HD 5870.

As with many graphics families, this second-tier offering represented – and still represents – incredible value for money thanks to offering up the same feature set and only a slightly reduced specification from the top-of-the-range card, albeit at a much more attractive price point.

When this card cost £225, it offered great value for money. These days it's considerably cheaper than that, and has had to weather competition from both AMD and Nvidia, but it still puts it a good show in the latest games.

There are also rumours that more affordable versions of the Radeon HD 5850 are in the works, so be prepare to shop around to bag a bargain.

1. Nvidia GeForce GTX 460 1GB (£130)

best graphics cards

The 1GB version of the GTX 460 (there's also a noticeably less powerful 768MB iteration) started at a price-point that undercut its immediate Radeon-shaped competition by a fair margin, and that's only got better as the months have gone by.

The GTX 460's rejigged GF100 GPU though may sound like Nvidia has just chopped the GTX 480's chip in half, with only seven streaming multiprocessors (SMs) against the older card's fourteen, but inside, things have most definitely changed.

These SMs are the units that hold the myriad CUDA cores (previously known as shader processors), special function units (SFUs), texture mapping units (TMUs) and the polymorph engines that contain the all-important tessellation grunt.

The SMs of the GF100 chips contain a maximum of 32 shader cores, four SFUs and four TMUs. In the GTX 460 chip though Nvidia has squeezed another 16 CUDA cores into each SM and upped the SFU and TMU counts to eight per SM.

Each of these SMs has also had some CPU-like extra multi-threading goodness injected into them in the shape of an extra couple of dispatch units in each of them.

What this means is awesome midrange performance, and respectable performance at resolutions higher than 1680 x 1050. Pair a couple up for SLI kicks though, and you get a punchy setup that can rival Nvidia's own GTX 580.

These mid-range graphics card represent the sensible money for most PC gamers; combining great raw performance with a price tag that won't make you pass out.

If you're looking to power a screen with a native resolution of 1,680 x 1,050 or 1,920 x 1,080, then you really don't need to get anything more powerful than this. At least given the current slew of games.

These cards also hold an ace up their sleeve if you have an SLI or CrossFire motherboard in your rig, because they enable you to boost the performance of your machine by adding in a second card as your needs progress.

5. Nvidia GeForce GTX 550 (£128)

best graphics card

Originally designed to replace the GTS 450, the GTX 550 Ti has recently found itself being pushed out of the frame by the Radeon HD 6790 (which we're looking at next). Yes, it's a next-generation graphics card, but is that alone enough to make it relevant? Not really.

As with the Radeon HD 6790, The GTX 550 Ti suffers comparison with the slower, but more-affordable GTS 450 and the faster, and only a bit more pricey GeForce GTX 460. Indeed it's testament to the GTX 460 that it still manages to define this end of the market.

If you've got a 20-inch or 22-inch screen, then the GTX 550 Ti is briefly worth considering, because it will produce playable framerates at 1,680 x 1,050 at reasonable settings. Unfortunately, unless there's a bizarre disease that specifically targets the GTX 460 and removes it from the world, we'd recommend hunting down that older card every time.

4. AMD Radeon HD 6790 (£110)

best graphics cards

The latest addition to the graphics card market comes hot on the heels of the fastest graphics cards ever released, namely the AMD Radeon HD 6990 and the Nvidia GeForce GTX 590.

However unlike those behemoths of modern unified shader engineering, this is a card aimed squarely at the affordable end of the market. And as such, it finds itself battling for relevance against the likes of the GTX 460, the GTX 550 and even AMD's own Radeon HD 5770 at the more-affordable end of things.

Using the Barts LE core, this shares more of the inner workings of the Radeon HD 6850 and 6870 than it does the far more impressive Cayman powered 6950. That said, this is an affordable card, and as such AMD is forced to focus on budgets rather than capabilities. It shows as well, and ultimately comes up a little short in the comparisons – although it does a good job of sticking it to the GTX 550 Ti, and at a lower price.

In essence this isn't a bad card, it merely lacks the oomph to make it stand out on one side, or a really low price tag to make it stand out on the other. It's neither one nor the other. Given the spectre that is the GTX 460 still towers over it, and can be had for only £20 or so more, you're better offer forgoing a few pints and grabbing one of those instead.

3. AMD Radeon HD 6850 (£135)

best graphics cards

Launched at the same time as its slightly costlier sibling, the Radeon HD 6870, the Barts XT powered Radeon HD 6850 graphics processor failed to impress at launch due almost entirely to its misguided pricing. For reference, the card originally shipped at £160, at a time when Nvidia was cutting the price of comparably-powerful GTX 460.

The Barts XT GPU was essentially a stop gap while AMD put the finishing touches to the Cayman GPU that can be found powering the incredible Radeon HD 6950 GPU. Beyond a more power-efficient core, and a slightly reworked tessellation engine, this cards only real claim to fame is that it was the first of the second-generation of DX11 graphics cards.

The fact that it failed to comprehensively better the Radeon HD 5850 its name would suggest it was meant to replace also grated, and even though it's officially supposed to be heading for end of life status, you'd still rather pick up a 5850 to one of these.

Time has started to treat the Radeon HD 6850 a little fairer though, and a good £20-30 has been shaved off the launch price to make for a slightly more appealing pixel-pusher.

Better value cards can still be had for less, while those looking for real power should set their sights on the Radeon HD 6950. Having said that, if you can pick up the 6850 at closer to £120, then it'll give the budget-licious GTX 460 a run for its money, and is worth grabbing.

2. Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 (£200)

best graphics card

Given how the GTX 460 has come to define the budget end of the graphics card market, it was only a matter of time before Nvidia released its successor, the GTX 560 Ti. And while it would have been nice to see this card roll out £50 cheaper than this, given the technology throbbing away inside its black exterior, that would be a lot to ask.

In actual fact this card is pitched more against the GTX 470, both in terms of pricing and performance. The re-engineered Fermi core has been refined and tweaked to produce an impressive graphics processor, packing 384 CUDA cores and 64 texture units into its monolithic design.

The GTX 560 Ti may lack the vapour chamber cooling of the top-end cores, but that doesn't stop it being an incredible little overclocker. Anyone looking to get a bit more performance out of their quality graphics card has a decent amount to play with here too.

This is an impressive graphics card, and if you have a particularly unreasonable allegiance to Nvidia then you're not completely off the money. The problem is, the AMD Radeon HD 6950 has a serious trick up its sleeve, performs where it needs, and can be had for only £10 more. And when you're looking at this much cash, that's money you really should spend.

1. AMD Radeon HD 6950 (£210)

best graphics card

Every few years a graphics card is released that sums up that generation better than any other. We're talking about the likes of the 8800GT and the budget-focused Radeon X1950 Pro. Cards that transcend their immediate markets and time frames and stand up for years to come as being bang on the money.

The AMD Radeon HD 6950 defines the market. Cheaper cards look up to it for its raw power, while the top-end cards are mindful of the sheer value it offers and are rightly fearful of what can be achieved when two are cajoled together in CrossFire.

The Radeon HD 6950 isn't a subtle reworking of the first generation of DX11 graphics in the same way that Barts is, but rather a complete reworking of the inner logic of AMDs graphics chips. And its an incredible card for it.

The performance is incredible at console-breaking 1080p resolutions, and in DX11 games it punches well above its weight. If you're looking for a no-nonsense card that will last you until DX12 rolls out, and don't plan on running insanely high resolutions, this is the card for you.

Those with the stomach for it will discover that they can turn their £200 Radeon HD 6950 into a fully fledged 6970 with a BIOS flash as well. Here is a card that both AMD and Nvidia are going to be hard pushed to beat any time soon. Simply incredible.

The following five cards represent the pinnacle of modern graphics performance. These are cards that are beyond the sweet spot of what's needed in order to enjoy the latest games at reasonable resolutions.

The following cards are essentially here to fill the niches in gamers requirements that the likes of the Radeon HD 5960 cannot satisfy. Here we're talking about outputting to 27-inch and 30-inch panels that have a native resolution of 2560 x 1600. Or multiple screen displays made up of three or more 22-inch or 24-inch panels.

?This end of the market is complicated somewhat by the advances made in SLI and CrossFire. These twin-graphics card pairing technologies now genuinely provide the performance improvements over single cards that you would hope for – 90-95% is often the norm.

A pair of cheaper cards in SLI can outperform the following cards too, which means the requirement of having a supporting motherboard is generally the only thing that is holding you back.

5. AMD Radeon HD 6970 (£260)

best graphics cards

Given that the AMD Radeon HD 6970 is simply a faster spin of the Radeon HD 6950 with more of everything that makes that card so great, surely this then is a fine card worthy of the money? Not quite.

The problem is, while Radeon HD 6950 is slower than this, it's only just slower. At the higher resolutions, which is all that really matters for these high-end cards, we're talking a few frames per second different at most.

In real terms you'd be hard pushed to spot such differences, which means that the extra £50 you pay for this over the cheaper card doesn't really pay off. That and the fact that the first slew of Radeon HD 6950s can be flashed to essentially turn them into 6970s conspire to make this a card that doesn't quite add up.

The fact of the matter is: if you want the kind of performance that will drive a bigger display, you're going to need to spend more than this.

4. Nvidia GeForce GTX 590 (£584)

best graphics cards

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 590 is a dual-GPU graphics card, similar in performance and guise to the Radeon HD 6990 that proceeded it into the market by roughly a month.

This means that inside that huge cooler you'll find a pair of GTX 580 cores humming away at not-quite GTX 580 speeds. In real terms that equates to a whopping 1024 CUDA cores, 96 ROPS and access to a healthy 3GB of GDDR5.

In order to fit a pair of GPUs inside a single card though, speed sacrifices have had to be made.

In the case of the GeForce GTX 590, that means dropping the core clock from the GTX 580's 772MHz down to a 607MHz. The memory speed too has been slashed, from 1.02GHz down to 853MHz.

As with the Radeon HD 6990, anyone looking for the ultimate in performance should really look at pairing up two GTX 580s, although that will cost you considerably more.

We've given the Radeon HD 6990 the slight nod over the GTX 590 simply because it does have the lead in the titles that matter, however slight that actually is.

3. AMD Radeon HD 6990 (£550)

best graphics cards

The Radeon HD 6990 is the second of two cards that utilise a pair of graphics processors to produce framerates that are out of this world. Although as you can see, this does come at a obvious downside – the pricing.

The Radeon HD 6990 utilises a new graphics processor, named Antilles, which is a slightly tweaked take on the Cayman core that can be found in the Radeon HD 6870, albeit not at the full speed of that GPU. This means you get the full 4GB of GDDR5 memory, strong tessellation performance and a stunning 3,072 streaming processors for handling your games.

Unfortunately, in order to cram two GPUs into the power footprint of a single graphics card, the core clock speed has had to be reduced from 880MHz to 830MHz. Similarly, the memory is running at 1.25GHz as opposed to the 1.375GHz of the 6970.

In truth there really isn't a lot between this and the previous card, the GTX 590 – they offer roughly the same performance and cost about the same.

If you're in the market for a dual-GPU graphics card, then your preference essentially comes down to whether you prefer AMD's drivers and support, or Nvidia's.

2. Nvidia GeForce GTX 570 (£280)

best graphics card

Value for money may seem like a strange metric to pull out of the hat at this end of the graphics market, but the GTX 570 does a decent turn at making your investment feel prudent rather than simply excessive.

Essentially a replacement for the soon to be retired GTX 480, here is a card that essentially does everything that Nvidia's last-generation top dog did, but without the problems that card suffered from when it shipped.

The cooler is quiet and more efficient, and the raw power on offer from this sub-£300 card is stunning. This is a slightly cut down version of the GTX 580, losing one Streaming Multiprocessor (or 32 CUDA cores to put it another way) and 8 ROPs.

The GTX 570's core operates at 732MHz as opposed to the GTX 580's 772MHz, while the 1,280MB of GGDR5 memory speeds along at 950MHz, as opposed to the GTX 580's 1,002MHz.

For the money, there isn't a lot out there that can touch the GTX 570 in terms of pure performance, apart from possible a pair of GTX 460s in SLI – but such a configuration does require an SLI motherboard.

1. Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 (£395)

best graphics cards

The GeForce GTX 580 is the fastest single-GPU graphics card currently available, and probably will be the only option for some time to come yet.

Created as the spiritual successor to the much-maligned GTX 480, Nvidia took the problems it had with its first DX11 graphics card and corrected them.

This means you get a full-fat core boasting 512 CUDA cores and 48 ROPS, not one that has been cut down to achieve better yields. And all running at a healthy 772MHz with a 1,002MHz memory bus for the 1,384MB of GDDR5 memory.

Not everyone needs the power of a GTX 580 – only those with serious screens to power. This is a market targeted by the twin-GPU Goliaths that are the AMD Radeon HD 6990 and Nvidia' own GeForce GTX 590.

The GTX 580 still has the nod though, because those cards have had to be throttled back to fit on a single card, while here you know nothing is being constrained. This is still the most sensible option for anyone looking for unfettered speed from a single GPU.

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Sunday, April 17, 2011

The 10 fastest computers in the world

12:59 PM Tech Plus

This article is brought to you in association with LG Optimus 2X

If you thought your PC was fast, wait until you see what Tianhe-1A can do: the Intel and Nvidia-powered supercomputer can do in a day what a dual-core personal computer would take 160 years to complete.

It's a serious bit of kit, and it's not the only supercomputer with more cores than we've had hot dinners.

Every six months, the TOP500 project ranks the world's most powerful computers - and right now, these are the top ten machines the world has ever seen.

1. The slightly mysterious Chinese one: Tianhe-1A

China's supercomputer is currently the world's fastest: it can run at a sustained 2.5 petaflops (a petaflop is a thousand trillion floating point operations per second) thanks to its 186,368 cores and 229,376GB of RAM.

While the horsepower comes from off-the-shelf Intel and Nvidia chips, the New York Times says that the Chinese machine's speed is down to its interconnect, the networking technology that connects the individual nodes of the computer together, which is twice as fast as the InfiniBand technology used in many other supercomputers.

It's located in Shenzhen's National Supercomputing Centre, where it's used by universities and Chinese companies.

Tianhe

Image credit: Nvidia

2. The one with a quarter of a million cores: Jaguar

Jaguar, a Cray XT5-HE supercomputer located at the US Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has quite a few cores: TOP500 says there are nearly a quarter of a million since its most recent upgrade.

Jaguar's 224,162 cores come courtesy of a whole bunch of six-core Opteron chips, and its performance is a hefty 1.76 petaflops. Oak Ridge says it's the world's fastest supercomputer for unclassified research.

Jaguar

Image credit: NCCS.gov

3. The other slightly mysterious Chinese one: Dawning Nebulae

When it launched in early 2010 the Chinese Dawning Nebulae supercomputer was the world's fastest, with performance of 1.27 petaflops, but it's already in third place thanks to Jaguar and China's own newer, faster Tianhe-1A. Like its sibling Nebulae is in the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen.

Dawning nebulae

Image credit: Nvidia

4. The one with the rubbish name: TSUBAME 2.0

Tokyo's TSUBAME 2.0 offers similar performance to Jaguar - it peaks at 2.3 petaflops, with sustained performance of around 1.4 petaflops - but it's one-quarter of the size and uses one-quarter of the power thanks to its heavy reliance on Nvidia Fermi GPUs as well as Intel CPUs.

According to project lead Professor Satoshi Matsuoka, TSUBAME will really shine in climate and weather forecasting, biomolecular modelling and tsunami simulations.

5. The planet-saver: Hopper

Hopper is working on the big stuff: climate change, clean energy, astrophysics, particle physics... its home, the US Department of Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, offers its services to more than 3,000 researchers in the fields of climate research, chemistry, new material development and other crucial fields.

Hopper

Image credit: NERSC

6. The French one: Tera-100

The first petaflop-scale supercomputer to be designed and built in Europe is pretty fast: "its capacity to transfer information is equivalent to a million people watching high-definition films simultaneously", the press release says.

Built around Intel Xeon 7500 processors, the successor to 2005's Tera 10 is 20 times faster and seven times more energy efficient as its predecessor. It's another nuclear one: Tera-100's mission is to help guarantee the reliability of Europe's nukes.

Tera-100

Image credit: Bull

7. The former champion: Roadrunner

Supercomputing is a fast-moving field, and Roadrunner is the proof: in 2008 it was the first supercomputer to crack the petaflop barrier for sustained performance, but its 1.04 petaflop speed means it fell to seventh place in just two years.

Built by IBM for the US Department of Energy, it was designed to work out whether the US's nuclear weapons would remain safe as they age - although like most supercomputers it's also available to industry, with car and aerospace industries paying for a go.

Roadrunner

Image credit: IBM

8. The answer to life, the universe and everything: Kraken

Can your computing project be handled by a machine with 511 cores? Then don't bother coming to Kraken: it's best suited to jobs that use "at least 512 cores". It's got plenty to spare: the National Institute for Computational Sciences reports that the Cray supercomputer has 112,895 compute cores spread across 9,408 nodes.

Its purpose? To help "solve the world's greatest scientific challenges, such as understanding the fundamentals of matter and unlocking the secrets to the origin of our universe".

Kraken

Image credit: UTK

9. The ultimate DVD ripper: JUGENE

Germany's supercomputer was designed for low power consumption as well as high performance, and it's been involved in some interesting projects - including trying to work out how DVDs work. According to Scientific Computing, it's improving our understanding of "the processes involved in writing and erasing a DVD", which should lead to storage media that works better, lasts longer and provides higher capacity.

Jugene

Image credit: Forschungszentrum Ju¨lich

10. The one keeping nukes safe: Cielo

Nuclear science and supercomputers are a match made in heaven: the former can use the latter to test things without blowing anybody up or irradiating them for generations. Cielo is used for "classified operations" by the US National Nuclear Security Administration, and it's getting a big upgrade this year: its 6,704 computing nodes will be upped to 9,000, and its memory will go from 221.5TB to around 300TB.

Cielo

Image credit: NNSA

The ones coming soon: Titan and Sequoia

Will China lose its fastest computer crown in 2012? That's when the US Titan supercomputer, a $100 million machine for the US Department of Energy, comes online - and it's also when IBM's Tianhe-1A-rivalling Sequoia gets plugged in too. TItan is designed to analyse complex energy systems, while Sequoia will work on simulations of nuclear explosions to reduce the need for real-world tests.

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Friday, April 15, 2011

In Depth: How Mac apps are transforming world sport

3:22 PM Tech Plus

Say you were to meet former England rugby captain Steve Borthwick in a bar - what would you talk about once the rugger conversation dried up?

Well, you could bring up the subject of Macs, seeing as they play a key role in helping him - and hundreds of other elite athletes - prepare for their big games.

In football, you'll find Macs at Manchester United, Tottenham Hotspur and Everton, to name just a few Premiership sides. The England national team also uses them, as do the majority of top rugby union sides, national basketball teams and the West Indies cricketers.

With the help of highly trained performance analysts and software written specifically for the Mac, the Apple gear is vital in providing feedback to players about their performances, both during matches and training, as well as post-match. Not only that, it has become a key tool in preparing teams for forthcoming opposition tactics.

The analysis software of choice is Sportstec's SportsCode, which has been Mac-only ever since the company started a decade ago. Sportstec's UK CEO Jon Moore, himself a former rugby coach and analyst with the Welsh Rugby Union and Bath Rugby, revealed that there was only ever one choice of computer for SportsCode to run on.

"The basis was choosing a platform that was going to give us the functionality range that we wanted to achieve," he explains. "There was no question the Mac was going to give that cutting edge. It doesn't crash, it handles video, it compresses while we're in the middle of a performance and it enables us to have information immediately available to coaches during and after a performance."

From LA to Cardiff

A glance at Sportstec's list of clients tells you that performance analysis is a seriously big deal in elite sport. As well as the teams we mentioned above, other users include Chelsea and Liverpool football clubs, David Beckham's LA Galaxy, FIFA, the majority of the top NBA basketball teams and the English national cycling team. Taken together, that's a lot of Macs in high-up places, so we decided to go to the epicentre of the revolution to find out what all the fuss is about.

Tucked away in a quiet suburb of the Welsh capital at the University of Wales Institute Cardiff (UWIC) is the Centre for Performance Analysis (CPA), which is leading the way in performance analysis research and teaching. It's here that a dedicated team of top coaches, analysts and technicians is constantly pushing the boundaries of performance analysis, and training the next generation as part of their postgraduate courses.

From the moment you walk in, it's clear they love anything Apple-related. As we sit in a lab full of the latest 21-inch iMacs, coaches come and go with iPads tucked under their arms or iPhones pressed to their ears. Even the routers are Apple AirPort Extremes, selected in favour of cheaper alternatives for the simple reason that they work so seamlessly with the rest of the Apple kit.

SportsCode's a complex and powerful bit of software that's been designed with ease of use in mind so analysts, coaches and players alike can use it. Before a match or a training session, coaches work with analysts to determine what aspects of play they want to focus on and this is coded into what's called a template.

So in basketball, one such example could be every time a player blocks an opposition's shot. As play begins, a live video stream is fed from a DV camera into the analyst's Mac. With footage rolling in, the analyst attaches appropriate tags to the video. That way, when the coach wants to see all occasions when shots were blocked by opponents, he can watch all the clips one after the other, with no need to rewind or fast-forward long reams of footage.

Given time, this can lead to a huge database of clips that players and coaches can look back on, to gauge progress over a period of time.

Model pros

The assistant coach of the Great Britain women's basketball team, Damian Jennings, is in no doubt about the importance of the Mac's role in performance analysis.

Damian jennings

MACS AT WORK: Basketball coach Damian Jennings talks us through some of his recent match analysis

"After four years of using the Mac for performance analysis at UWIC, it's become part of the fabric of what the players do here," he explains. "The interesting test was last summer, when I took it to the GB team for the first time; they were blown away by it. They're used to watching VHS video, but with this we're able to get a Minority Report-style screen of various footage coming up of different situations.

"What the Mac and SportsCode enable you to do is get information fast and instantly respond to players' questions - perhaps about us getting out-rebounded by the opposition - rather than saying 'I'll get back to you tomorrow'. It becomes interactive, so they can ask to see specific aspects, and we can do that at the touch of a button," Jennings says.

As we chat to various coaches, it becomes clear that selling the idea of performance analysis with SportsCode has been made infinitely easier by the fact it runs on Macs.

"If you look at what computers all the players have, they've all got Macs," Jennings enthuses. "Last night we had a performance analysis session where they had to take notes, and about half of them were writing on Macs as opposed to hand-writing."

"It's trendy, isn't it?" Moore agrees. "Everybody wants a Mac, and when you realise how easy and intuitive it is to use, it only takes a short spell with a young player to show them what a Mac can do compared to a PC.

"The players have often got iPhones anyway, so the Mac's an easy sell. It's about lifestyle and empowerment - I was a carpenter and joiner, then for over 20 years I was a professional coach before I became manager of this software. I've come through various different types of employment, but I can manage my own web page, I can video stream - Mac means empowerment."

The Mac bug has bitten plenty of players after they witness the machines used in their performance analysis. Moore goes on: "I've got young players who I mentor, and I use iChat and video chat with them. I can be 200 miles away, sharing their desktop and showing them vital critiques of their game. Tell me how I could do that on a PC without it being too complicated…" He pauses to allow for a response, but you can tell he doesn't expect an answer.

Darrell Cobner, the Director of the CPA who worked with the English rugby union team that won the World Cup in 2003, reflects on his experience.

Darrell cobner

WINNING COMBINATION: CPA director Darrell Cobner worked with the English rugby World Cup-winning side in 2003

"If you go back to when I was with England rugby, you had the old guard who have been in the game for a long time, who know it inside out and know what they're doing. They probably don't need performance analyses because they're going to reflect on their own performances. But with some of the younger groups, such as the under-21s, you're exposing them to it when they're a bit more familiar with computers in the first place.

"One player who really got to grips with the lineout side of it was Steve Borthwick. He'd take a collection of opposition lineouts and got in amongst the video to know what they were going to do against us," Cobner explains.

The new breed

A smile comes across Moore's face at the mention of the former England Captain. "At that time, I was the Forward and Scrum Coach at Bath," he says. "Steve was one of the first players to say 'I'm buying a Mac'. He was then asking if he could take the footage home to look at. He was the new breed of professional who understood he was investing in a Mac and investing in his future.

"And it made a difference. He was a player who'd just broken into the first team, and we would count his significant moments in a game. When he started, he'd just be breaking into double figures. But studying and looking at situations, and working with the Mac and software to understand how he could deploy himself better, he went up to 30-plus moments in a short period of time," Moore enthuses. "He was the first player to say 'Where's the game, where are my individual moments? Jon, will you sit down with me and go through them?'

"And through that period of sitting with him, we ended up setting up a room where the players could come to look at footage."

Players reviewing and analysing their own footage is something several coaches touch on, and the simplicity of the Mac platform is one of the key enablers. Huw Wiltshire, who spent many years with the Welsh Rugby Union, most recently as their performance manager, is a big advocate of the difference it has made to modern athletes.

Training tool

TRAINING TOOL: The CPA is the training ground for the next generation of top performance analysts

"When you get players reviewing their performances, you know you're getting the right message through to people, because you've got a player being proactive to the point where they want to generate their own self-analysis or an analysis of the opposition. It's leading us to more self-sufficient athletes," he says.

"The difference I've seen in 15 years of professional rugby is that players are far more educated and critical in a constructive fashion.

"Ultimately, what a lot of the Mac software does is provide simple, clear direction. You don't want people paying lip service, just saying 'Oh, I've done my analysis'. You want them to use it for a purpose, and the Mac is a really powerful piece of kit from a number of perspectives. From the laptop to the iPad and iPhone, to the fact that you can sync and get a congruence between the three, it's a complete performance solution."

Wiltshire's point about Apple's portable devices brings us onto an area of analysis that's growing incredibly fast. With the iOS family, the analysts are no longer limited to providing feedback after a match or training session - they can now feed live, real-time information straight back to the coaches in the dug-out or on the practice pitch.

Basketball coach Jennings has been one of the first to try out the mobile system, and he's already a big fan. "We're using iPod touches at the moment but we hope to have iPads in the future. Half a dozen pieces of statistical information we want there and then get sent to us as coaches, and we can deal with it. Hopefully with the iPad we'll be able to get visual feedback as well," he enthuses.

Apple kit

APPLE KIT: The Apple kit they use at top sports clubs is the same gear many of us have at home

One of the apps they use is iCODA, which links to CODA, another of Sportstec's products. But a lot of the others are the same apps many of us use on a day-to-day basis, including iTeleport, which enables you to control your computer from an iPad, AirDisplay and Air Sharing.

We go upstairs to see another of the CPA's labs, this one with a range of iMacs of different ages adorning the desks, including some of the first Intel models that are now approaching their fifth birthday. It's a testament to the platform that these machines are still able to run such demanding software, even though we're told they're to be replaced fairly soon.

But it's this quality and longevity of the hardware that's totally won the CPA's technical experts over, for the same core reasons that most of us buy Macs.

"With all the software pushing the machines to the limit, they have to be high spec if you want to watch clips back, scroll through video and do compressions in the background," explains Adam Cullinane, a Performance Analysis Officer, as we sit in his office, stacked to the roof with Apple kit, past and present.

He and his colleague Lucy Holmes, the Performance Analysis Laboratory Director, spend their time pushing the Mac hardware and software to its limits. Their current project is to test an AirPort Extreme outside, so that it can be used at larger sports venues, including those where there isn't an electrical socket available.

"We don't have power at a lot of places," Holmes says. "So we've just bought a portable power unit to see if it can run an AirPort Extreme. When we can set up a wireless network out in the field, we'll be able to take everything we do indoors with the basketball and the iPads and iPod touches, and see what more we can do. We know that with the new laptops we can get a decent enough time off the battery if they're fully charged - we can do what we need to with the Macs during a game."

New applications

ADVANCED ANALYSIS: SportsTec CEO Jon Moore and CPA director Darrell Cobner are constantly finding new ways to make Macs support top athletes

So battery life is a big deal, and knowing that the CPA does use some PC-based software (the iMacs are dual-boot for this purpose), we tentatively enquire if they ever use PC laptops out in the field, away from a power outlet.

"PC laptop? That's a drinks coaster isn't it?" Holmes grins. "Under normal use, I'd probably get three or four hours out of my PC laptop, compared to double that on a Mac - I'll easily get a whole day of working on my MacBook Pro. Now you won't get a whole day doing the video stuff, but you'll get three hours or so, which is plenty for what we need when setting up for a match, plus half time, extra time - you can easily cover that.

"I've never tried doing a match using a PC laptop, and I wouldn't want to! There's no equivalent piece of software [to SportsCode] on the Windows side either," she says. "The other thing about using Apple hardware is that you don't have to trial it too much to know if it's going to work. If you've got one company making the laptops and the peripherals to go with it, they're going to design it to work."

From academic to analyst

The CPA is more than just an innovation centre in performance analysis - as we mentioned earlier, it's also where some of the top teams' analysts learned their trade. Recent attendee Darren Lewis made the short journey across the Severn Bridge to Premiership side Bath Rugby, where he's now their Head Performance Analyst.

Lewis has kept the open-access setup of iMacs that now-Sportstec CEO Moore devised, enabling the players to go and review the footage in their own time. With fellow analysts David Reed and Aled Griffiths, he is now working to stream video into SportsCode at the club's new training ground.

"We'll have multiple cameras directly feeding to the office so that training can be captured and shared live, so the coaches can be on the pitch reviewing things as they happen," Lewis says. "With the introduction of the iPad, this gives the guys the ability to almost instantly view their last actions, so it's a great learning tool.

"Our strength and conditioning department also use MacBook Pros, and it's a huge benefit to have as many people as possible on the same platform so that information can be shared with ease."

The club's match day setup is equally impressive, as the image opposite shows. "We use at least five MacBook Pros during a game, where the coaches all have the ability to review any aspect of play whenever they choose," Lewis says.

"The reliability and functionality of the Mac means we can carry out our daily tasks without the worry of the computer crashing. We use the SportsCode templates to break the game up into relevant pieces - scrums, lineouts, kicks, tackles and so on. The combined power of the Mac and SportsCode makes our lives a lot easier when we're going through training or games."

The data the analysts collect isn't just kept as tables of figures, either, and it's a testament to the power of iWork '09 that the club chooses it over other, more complex packages.

Lewis explains: "The data we collect via SportsCode is all transferred into Numbers. It's extremely similar to Excel, but Numbers allows us to create effective statistical reports really easily. They're simple to understand and visually pleasing.

Huw wiltshire

CHANGE FOR THE BETTER: Former Welsh Rugby Union performance manager Huw Wiltshire believes Mac-based performance analysis has changed sport for the better

Extra edge

"We work directly with the coaches and players, and the information is distributed to their Macs to do their homework on our upcoming opposition. Everything we do is to provide the guys with as much information as possible to put us in the best position to win."

Before he leaves, Lewis can't help but mention the players' passion for all things Mac. "They love them! On the bus to away games there are MacBooks, iPhones and iPads everywhere - I think the majority of the team owns one…"

It struck us during our visit that the reasons Macs are used in elite sport are exactly the same as why the rest of us choose them over their PC counterparts. They very rarely crash, their handling of video is second-to-none, they can multi-task and notebook battery life is stunning.

They're the same machines we all use on a day-to-day basis, and therein lies the power of your Mac.

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