Void

Void may refer to:

In science and engineering

ØØ Void

ØØ Void (pronounced in interviews as Double-O Void) is the debut studio album by Sunn O))). The album was recorded to 24 track 2" tape at Grandmaster studios in Hollywood, a large step forward in production values from the band's demo The Grimmrobe Demos.

The third track, "Rabbits' Revenge", is an interpretation of an early version of the song "Hung Bunny" by the Melvins from the album Lysol.

The album was originally released in 2000, by Hydra Head in the USA, and by Rise Above in Europe and the United Kingdom. In 2008, ØØ Void was reissued, and released in Japan only, through Japanese record label Daymare Recordings. The reissue was a two-disc set, with the first disc containing all of the original tracks from ØØ Void and the second disc containing a collaboration between Sunn O))) and experimental/industrial group Nurse with Wound. The album was re-released in the original single-disc format in 2011 by Southern Lord Recordings, with new album artwork by Stephen Kasner.

Track listing

Aether (classical element)

According to ancient and medieval science, aether (Greek: αἰθήρ aithēr), also spelled æther or ether, also called quintessence, is the material that fills the region of the universe above the terrestrial sphere. The concept of aether was used in several theories to explain several natural phenomena, such as the traveling of light and gravity. In the late 19th century, physicists postulated that aether permeated all throughout space, providing a medium through which light could travel in a vacuum, but evidence for the presence of such a medium was not found in the Michelson–Morley experiment.

Mythological origins

The word αἰθήρ (aithēr) in Homeric Greek means "pure, fresh air" or "clear sky". In Greek mythology, it was thought to be the pure essence that the gods breathed, filling the space where they lived, analogous to the air breathed by mortals. It is also personified as a deity, Aether, the son of Erebus and Nyx in traditional Greek mythology. Aether is related to αἴθω "to incinerate", and intransitive "to burn, to shine" (related is the name Aithiopes (Ethiopians; see Aethiopia), meaning "people with a burnt (black) visage"). See also Empyrean.

Message Passing Interface

Message Passing Interface (MPI) is a standardized and portable message-passing system designed by a group of researchers from academia and industry to function on a wide variety of parallel computers. The standard defines the syntax and semantics of a core of library routines useful to a wide range of users writing portable message-passing programs in different computer programming languages such as Fortran, C, C++ and Java. There are several well-tested and efficient implementations of MPI, including some that are free or in the public domain. These fostered the development of a parallel software industry, and encouraged development of portable and scalable large-scale parallel applications.

History

The message passing interface effort began in the summer of 1991 when a small group of researchers started discussions at a mountain retreat in Austria. Out of that discussion came a Workshop on Standards for Message Passing in a Distributed Memory Environment held on April 29–30, 1992 in Williamsburg, Virginia. At this workshop the basic features essential to a standard message-passing interface were discussed, and a working group established to continue the standardization process. Jack Dongarra, Tony Hey, and David W. Walker put forward a preliminary draft proposal in November 1992, this was known as MPI1. In November 1992, a meeting of the MPI working group was held in Minneapolis, at which it was decided to place the standardization process on a more formal footing. The MPI working group met every 6 weeks throughout the first 9 months of 1993. The draft MPI standard was presented at the Supercomputing '93 conference in November 1993. After a period of public comments, which resulted in some changes in MPI, version 1.0 of MPI was released in June 1994. These meetings and the email discussion together constituted the MPI Forum, membership of which has been open to all members of the high performance computing community.