Super Vayu to the rescue!

17/11/09 posted by Liz Niland

In an age when computers seem to be getting smaller and smaller, the Australian National University, along with the federal government and the CSIRO, have funded Australia’s most powerful supercomputer.

The Vayu, as it is known, is amongst the world’s top 30-40 supercomputers - a feat not achieved by its comparatively puny predecessor. Set to be operated by National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) when it reaches full capacity in December, the Vayu contains 11,936 processing cores. As professor and NCI director Lindsay Botten told SMH, such a number of cores is equivalent to “roughly 6000 home PCs but a good deal more elaborate”.

Obviously able to do a lot more than word processing and games of solitaire, the main task for the Vayu will be helping Australian scientists deepen their research into climate change.

On the back of yesterday’s post about Twitter’s Person of the Year nomination, comes a social media inspired result for the New Oxford American Dictionary’s Word of the Year. The winner? “Unfriend: To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.”

Unfriend was up against stiff competition from other words such as "deleb", "funemployed", "sexting" and a whole lot of “Obamaisms”, including my personal favourite; "Obamalicious".