http://cray.com/home.aspx

This is a pretty cool development. Cray is jumping on the personal supercomputing bandwagon - a company that obviously knows what it's doing when it comes to HPC.

This is big news for visualization and life science in particular. Check out the video demo.

While I am a Microsoft employee, these are my own observations of this announcement and the screenshots that followed...You can also see a comic book of the features here.

I was fascinated over the Labor Day weekend to see that Google is launching a new browser called Chrome. This is an interesting development, but not unexpected. Google has been hiring browser engineers and OS engineers for over four years. It is a bit odd, considering their support of Firefox that this is now the main vector for rendering - that will be interesting to see how that Firefox relationship develops.

Here are my feelings and take on this...this is the beginning of a very big and long transition...the transition of storage, computation and the movement of the UI/UX of apps to a more high-fidelity environment. What do I mean by high-fidelity? The Flash and Silverlight environment allows absolute positioning, opacity, layers, animation, etc. that the "dot-matrix-like" HTML doesn't really support. Web Services are increasingly making in-line code less desirable - performing the computation on the backside of the server and passing results back to be painted. Flash and Silverlight are a far superior way to render results - especially visualization of data and results.

Think about it - HTML allows a huge reach, but it's visualization abilities are pathetic - great for reading, not good for rendering huge amounts of data. This has been a personal frustration to myself and many other visualization experts that I know. Its interactivity is limited to linking - sure you can make drop down menus and other AJAX-type effects - but, man, that's a lot of work for what you get...the HTML fabris is straining under the user's desire to get richer (interactively and cinematically).

This new browser will allow Google to position applications in a tab centric approach, not just a page centric manner. There is a difference. By moving to a tab orientation, it means that they need to manage memory, process, state of each tab separately - this allows them to control the environment more precisely and robustly. This should sound a bit familiar - task management, memory protection, isolation...these are Operating System themes.

Here are a few screenshots that are interesting to me...

Hmmm... a task manager for each tab (applications running)

A way to deliver default applications to the user - calendar, in this case...

The new Chrome home page is like Explorer's tab thumbnail view, but also looks a lot like a task switcher (Flip3d or ALT-Tab)

A few interesting things here...still requires an OS beneath it for the overall Chrome rendering (it's using Webkit for HTML rendering) and its own hosting (will they build device drivers for Cameras, USB devices and Printers?) - which is interesting...also, where did all the ads go and the simple main Google search screen (sure it can be another tab, but look at the top right corner [Searches]).