US retakes first place from Japan on Top500 supercomputer ranking

The United States is on top of the supercomputing world in the Top500 ranking of the most powerful systems. The Frontier system from Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) running on AMD EPYC CPUs took first place from last year’s champ, Japan’s ARM A64X Fugaku system. It’s still in the integration and testing process at the ORNL in Tennessee, but will eventually be operated by the US Air Force and US Department of Energy.

Frontier, powered by Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s (HPE) Cray EX platform, was the top machine by a wide margin, too. It’s the first (known) true exascale system, hitting a peak 1.1 exaflops on the Linmark benchmark. Fugaku, meanwhile, managed less than half that at 442 petaflops, which was still enough to keep it in first place for the previous two years.  

Frontier was also the most efficient supercomputer, too. Running at just 52.23 gigaflops per watt, it beat out Japan’s MN-3 system to grab first place on the Green500 list. “The fact that the world’s fastest machine is also the most energy efficient is just simply amazing,” ORNL lab director Thomas Zacharia said at a press conference.

Other machines in the TOP10 include another HPE Cray EX system install at EuroHPC in Finland (151.9 petaflops), the IBM-built Summit system using 22-core Power( CPUs and NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs (148.8 petaflops) and Lawrence Livermore’s Sierra, a smaller-scale version of Summit that hit 94.6 Pflop/s.

China held two top-ten spots with its Sunway TaihuLight from the National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering & Technology (NRCPC) and Tianhe-2A built by China’s National University of Defense Technology (NUDT). However, China is rumored to already have no less than two exascale systems (according to the Linmark benchmark) on new Sunway Oceanlite and Tianhe-3 systems. Due to the current state of semiconductor politics, however, China is reportedly not revealing any new benchmarks or important advances. 

‘Star Wars: The Bad Batch’ season two arrives on Disney+ this fall

On Sunday, the final day of Disney’s Star Wars Celebration 2022 event, the company shared the first trailer for season two of The Bad Batch. And while we’ve known since last year that Disney planned to continue the series, the new season now has a release timeframe. It will debut on Disney+ this fall.

The trailer the company shared suggests the story will pick up following a time skip that leaves the members of Clone Force 99 looking older than they were in season one. Each one also is also seen wearing updated armor, with squad leader Hunter sporting a new scarf, for instance. As ever, it looks like the group has a tough journey ahead of them as they try to find a place in a changing galaxy. Oh, and there’s a Wookie with a lightsaber. 

A release window for season two of The Bad Batch was one of a handful of announcements Disney shared during Star Wars Celebration 2022. We also got our first look at Rogue One prequel Andor and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, the sequel to Respawn’s Fallen Order, in addition to updates on The Mandalorian and Ahsoka.

Recent ‘realityOS’ trademarks hint at Apple moving closer to AR/VR headset announcement

At the start of the year, a handful of developers, including Steve Troughton-Smith, found references to “realityOS,” the operating system for Apple’s long-rumored virtual and augmented reality headset. Now, a little more than a week before the start of WWDC 2022, the name has resurfaced in trademark filings seemingly linked to the company.

On Friday, Vox Media product manager Parker Ortolani took to Twitter to share two United States Patent and Trademark Office filings he found registered by a company called Realityo Systems LLC. As Parker and others have pointed out, there’s evidence to suggest Realityo Systems is a shell company created by Apple to obscure its tracks.

First, there’s the June 8th foreign filing deadline for both trademarks, which falls just two days after the start of WWDC 2022. Additionally, as noted by 9to5Mac, Realityo Systems LLC shares the same address as Yosemite Research LLC, the shell company Apple used to secure trademarks for past versions of its macOS operating system, including macOS Monterey. One more interesting tidbit of evidence is that in some countries Realityo Systems submitted trademark filings that include a realityOS logo written in Apple’s signature San Francisco typeface.

The timing of the filings suggests Apple is getting closer to the day it will feel comfortable sharing details about its augmented and virtual reality ambitions. However, we would caution against expecting an announcement as early as next week. In his latest Power On newsletter, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman predicts the company won’t hold “a full-blown presentation” on its mixed-reality headset at WWDC. In fact, he says he would be “wary of expecting” such an announcement from the company. Gurman previously reported that Apple was considering pushing the device’s debut back to 2023 due to ongoing development problems. Still, the company is clearly moving forward with the project.

Snapchat’s Shared Stories will let you collaborate with friends of friends

Snapchat has updated its Custom Stories feature to allow more people to participate. While the original version of the feature only gives you a way to add friends to view and contribute to your Stories, the new version called Shared Stories allows the friends you add to add their own contacts. Say you’re cooking and want your friends to add their cooking Stories, too — just add them to the group, so they can add more people, as well. Snap says that makes it easier “for the whole soccer team, camp squad, or group of new coworkers to get in on the fun.”

Like regular Stories, shared ones will only be visible for 24 hours before disappearing, but it doesn’t have a chat component, probably because it’s assumed that not all participants would know each other. The app will also use automatic language detection and other review tools to monitor additions and make sure they’re all safe. Finally, you will get a notification if you’ve joined a Shared Story with someone you’ve blocked. That gives you the chance to leave the Story if you’re not comfortable sharing a part of your life with those users. 

Snapchat has released and promised a number of other new features over the past couple of months, likely in an effort to get people to use the app more in face of slowing revenue growth. In April, it introduced a new suite of creator-friendly editing tools called “director mode” that will help you produce more polished content. It also introduced an ASL alphabet lens that you can use to learn the ASL alphabet and released the capability to share YouTube videos directly on the platform.