This is the outline of the seminar given to Kamo High students on 2 November 2012.

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The seminar is designed to extend student’s horizon in computing and digital connectivity beyond smart phones, tablets, laptops, desktops and servers.  It introduces the very small and the very powerful outside the spectrum of computing devices known to students.

The Very Small enables the realisation of getting connected anywhere, any time, and with any device.  We call these very small devices mote or dust whichever is more catchable.  They have been deployed in war zones previously, and are finding more applications in the city or wherever we want to have them.  We can have them on pavements, highways, power and water meters, and so on.  Essentially, the very small forms another network to turn the Internet into all things.

The Very Powerful helps extend the knowledge and capabilities of human mankind to a higher level covering the very large such as the universe to the very small such as molecules and atoms.  We call these very powerful machines supercomputers or HPC for High Performance Computing.  This seminar looks at the World Top 10 HPC, and the various applications HPC supports.  Applications also include designs of physical objects as well as creation of digital films and videos.  Broadly speaking, HPC is the main tool for digital content creation (practical) and digital concept creation (theoretical).

This lecture introduces and explains two technologies to students: MEMS (Micro Electro Magnetic System) for the Very Small and CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) for the Very Powerful.  MEMS is not new and has been widely deployed in smart phones and tablets.  CUDA was first introduced in 2007 by Nvidia and has reached version 5 by the end of 2012.