Intel: Processors w/ Fricken' Laser Beams!

[Swiss Miss]

http://techfreep.com/intel-announces...processors.htm

Intel will announce today their creation of a computer chip that could eliminate bottlenecks by using laser beams, not electrical wires, to transmit data.

While innovations in computer hardware constantly occur as companies strive to grab market share, breakthroughs such as these are rare. The addition of laser capabilities to new processors would allow for a currently unreachable standard of compactness and speed in computing.

The genesis of the chip came from the combined effort of Intel, the world’s largest processor manufacturer, and researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The new laser-silicon chips were created by bonding a layer of light-emitting indium phosphide to a chip’s surface, then etching small channels through which the light can travel. The resulting chip can use thousands of tiny lasers to flicker on and off billions of times per second, thus transmitting binary code at an impossibly rapid rate.

And while these achievements might seem impressive, they may be only the beginning. According to Eli Yablonovitch, a physicist at the University of California, Los Angeles,

This is a field that has just begun exploding in the past 18 months. There is going to be a lot more optical communications in computing than people have thought.

In the past such chips have been impossible because prior attempts to meld light-emitting materials onto have melted the silicon. That’s where UCSB stepped in. University researchers devised a method whereby iridium phosphate could be bonded with silicon without melting the chip’s surface. By using an electrically charged oxide gas just 25 atoms thick, they were able to heat and press the layer of oxide to a standard silicon chip, thus creating a hybrid that transmits information both through wires and beams of light.

While the new laser-emitting chips certainly mean a facelift for computing, they may spark a surge in the implementation of fiber-optics as well. John E. Bowers, the director of the Multidisciplinary Optical Switching Technology Center at UCSB, believes that this development may revolutionize the computing industry:

Photonics has been a low-volume cottage industry. Everything will change and laser communications will be everywhere, including fiber to the home.

[Big Red 11]

Wow.

Quantum computing advance...

Trapped light spurs quantum computing
March 14, 2007 - IN 1927, Albert Einstein conceived of a box in which light was trapped and a single light particle, or photon, was released in a theoretical experiment to measure the relationship between mass and energy.

=snip=

In a commentary also published by Nature, Ferdinand Schmidt-Kaler, a quantum physicist at Germany's University of Ulm, described the French achievement as an "experimental masterwork" with major implications for quantum computing, a field that proponents claim will make today's supercomputers look like an abacus.

Instead of using the binary digits 0 and 1 to hold information, quantum computing is based on a principle of quantum mechanics - changes of state, called superposition, that occur at atomic level. Quantum information, or a qubit, can be a 0 or 1 or simultaneously both 0 and 1, amounting to a fantastic potential boost in data storage, but only useful so long as it can be controlled and accessed.

FULL http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599...-23109,00.html

Super-secret quantum messages...

New Record for Quantum Cryptography
Friday, June 08, 2007 - Researchers take a big step toward their goal of spy-proof communications via satellites.

European scientists have broken a distance record for sending quantum information from one place to another, paving the way for a system that relies on the laws of physics to provide communications that can't be tapped. If they can extend the reach of their signal a little further, they'll be able to use satellites to send perfectly secure data around the world. The team used principles of quantum mechanics to create an encryption key in two locations simultaneously: one in a lab on La Palma, in the Canary Islands, and the second in an observatory on the neighboring island of Tenerife, 144 kilometers away. Such an encryption key can be used to encode data that only the sender and the receiver can decode.

"We want to see whether it is possible at all to establish worldwide quantum communication, worldwide quantum cryptography," says Anton Zeilinger, a professor of physics at the Institute for Experimental Physics at the University of Vienna, Austria. His team, along with a team led by Harald Weinfurter of the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics, in Garching, Germany, published its results online on June 3 in the journal Nature Physics. To create the key, the team first had to create pairs of entangled photons. Entanglement, which Albert Einstein called "spooky action at a distance," means that the fate of one photon is tied up with the fate of the other. Measuring any quantum mechanical property of one photon automatically changes that same property in its entangled partner, no matter the distance between them.

In this case, the team measured polarization. Light can be polarized in any direction; it's a measure of which direction the light waves are fluctuating in--horizontal or vertical, for example. Researchers created entangled pairs of photons by firing a powerful laser beam through a crystal. For each photon that went in, two weaker, entangled photons came out. The researchers bounced one half of each pair off a mirror to a local light detector on La Palma. They sent the other photon through a lens and out across the water, where a telescope on Tenerife caught it and sent it to a second light detector. "I have these two photons, and if I measure them on both ends and I ask them, 'Are you horizontally or vertically polarized?'--a binary choice--they will give a random answer," says Zeilinger. "But because of the entanglement, both will give the same answer. On both sides you get a zero or on both sides you get a one."

More Technology Review: New Record for Quantum Cryptography

The ultimate memory for computers?...

The Ultimate Computer Memory Upgrade - Iron Platinum Nanowires
22 June 2007 - Just a few years ago, the average computer user’s documents, applications and even photos seemed to rattle around a 120 GB disk drive. Today’s multimedia-intensive user can exhaust that capacity in no time and engineers expect to max out conventional magnetic storage techniques by about 2010.

At that point, they’ll be looking for nanotechnology to step up. A magnetic storage surface – the disk of a hard-disk drive -- consists of tiny sectors of magneti-cally-aligned particles. When the read-write head of a disk drive passes over a sector, it flips the magnetic field to the opposite direction – encoding a zero or a one. When it reads, it senses the magnetic field for the whole sector. To pack more information into a smaller area, engineers can make the particles smaller or the sectors smaller, but they need enough particles so that the occasional random flip doesn’t corrupt the whole sector.

It is now possible to apply magnetic nanoparticles in a thin, dense layer, but the magnetic fields of randomly-oriented spherical particles tend to cancel each other out. Instead of lining up at six o’clock or twelve o’clock, many particles align at two, three, four or five o’clock, diluting the overall strength of the magnetic signal. Long, narrow nanorods could pack alongside each other, with their magnetic fields oriented in only two directions. Imagine a plate covered with Good and Plenty’s rather than fireballs. The elongated candies line up side-by-side, while the balls roll around randomly. Nanorods, aligned in the same direction, should produce a stronger signal and switch cleanly from zero to one and vice versa.

The method developed by Sun, Hou, and graduate students Chao Wang and Jaemin Kim pro-duces batches of similarly-sized nanowires or nanorods in solution. The researchers found that including more surfactant (oleylamine) in the reaction mixture produced longer wires and that more solvent (octadecene) gave shorter rods. A three-to-one ratio of surfactant to solvent yielded 100 nm wires, while a one-to-one ratio produced 20 nm rods. Based on this pattern, plus transmission electron microscope and x-ray diffraction images, the researchers think that surfactant molecules create protective tunnels around the growing nano-rods, guiding them into longer, rather than thicker shapes. The surfactant molecules line up with water-loving tails inward and water-repellant heads out. With more surfactant in the solution, the tunnels (and the nanorods inside) grow longer before solvent molecules interrupt the pattern.

MORE

That's what Granny wants - a big ol' fast computer...

Scientists battle to build biggest supercomputer
Wednesday June 27, 2007 · Sun's £30m device soon to be overtaken by rival IBM · Machines getting more powerful and less costly

Scientists yesterday unveiled a new generation of supercomputers, including a £30m machine with the memory of 200000 home computers and a hard disk hefty enough to hold the entire Google index of the internet. The huge devices, each costing tens of millions of pounds, will compete against each other this year for the title of the planet's biggest electronic brains.

The first contender, Constellation, has been built by Sun Microsystems at a cost of $59m (£30m) and boasts a 1.7 petabytes hard disk. It was unveiled yesterday at the International Supercomputer conference in Dresden, Germany. The machine - which will go live later this year - can operate at speeds of 421 teraflops, or 421 trillion calculations a second. This will outstrip IBM's 280 Teraflop Blue Gene/L, currently ranked as the world's fastest computer, by some distance. But operating at such levels will be a significant power drain, requiring the same amount of power to run as a high-speed intercity train.

Despite the immense cost, officials said that high powered computers were now more powerful and less expensive than ever before. "We have reached unprecedented cost performance for scientific computing," said Andreas Bechtolsheim, chief architect and co-founder of Sun. The first Constellation computer, called Ranger, will be installed at the University of Texas in order to assist scientists and engineers with running incredibly complex calculations. Half of the cost will go directly on the hardware, while the rest is being spent on research and staff.

MORE

[waltky]

Home environmental control on a PC...

IBM Advances Supercomputer-On-A-Chip Technology
December 6, 2007 : For companies, it would mean having smaller computers that are far more powerful than today's machines, yet produce far less heat.

IBM on Thursday unveiled a technical advancement related to the use of light to carry large amounts of data quickly among cores within a microprocessor, taking the company closer to developing a chip that may one day run notebooks with the horsepower of today's supercomputers. The breakthrough revolves around a device used to transform electrical impulses into beams of light. The device, called a modulator, is similar to what's used today in optical networks built by telecommunication companies. IBM scientists say they have found a way to shrink the modulator to a size where it can fit within a multi-core CPU.

The achievement, published in the journal Optics Express, is not all that's needed to one day bring data-carrying light beams to processors. However, it is an important first step toward production, which is about 10 to 15 years away, William Green, lead scientist on the project, told InformationWeek. "We've been working on this for sometime at IBM, and there's still a lot of work to do," he said. "It's one of the pieces within this larger network that we're designing and building."

The potential benefits of IBM's work to businesses and consumers are huge. For companies, it would mean having smaller computers that are far more powerful than today's machines, yet produce far less heat. Among the problems facing businesses today are the size and number of servers needed to process an ever-growing amount of data, which means larger expensive data centers. In addition, today's computers generate a lot of heat, requiring companies to spend more on power to cool them.

On the consumer side, a supercomputer in a box in the home could handle far more chores. Those tasks could range from operating lights and heating systems to processing and distributing video and more realistic computer games, which could include 3D environments in which characters move about seamlessly. In the latest advancement, IBM has managed to shrink the modulator to a size in which one can be assigned to each core in a chip, a requirement in using light. Green expects to one-day see hundreds to thousands of cores on a single piece of silicon, so the size of the modulator is important. The latest device is 100 to 1,000 times smaller than previous versions in the lab.

MORE

[waltky]

Big jump in RAM technology...

MetaRAM quadruples DDR2 DIMM capacities, launches 8GB DIMMs
February 24, 2008 - Since its launch in January 2006, the only thing that has been publicly known about former AMD CTO Fred Weber's new venture is its name: MetaRAM. Clearly, the stealth-mode company was working on something to do with RAM, but what?

As of today, MetaRAM is finally ready to talk about its technology, and it appears to be a pretty solid evolutionary step for the tried-and-true SDRAM DIMM module. In short, MetaRAM's technology enables DIMM capacity increases of two or four times, so that a single DDR2 MetaSDRAM DIMM can hold 4GB or 8GB of memory while still being a drop-in replacement for a normal DIMM.

Because MetaRAM's high-capacity DIMMs look to an Intel or AMD system like normal DDR2 DIMMs, the company expects to see servers with memory configurations that would normally require expensive custom hardware to become significantly cheaper. One of MetaRAM's channel partners will soon announce a server with 500GB of main memory for under $50,000.

I'm tempted to suggest that "500GB of memory oughta be enough for anybody," but MetaRAM is looking to virtualization and enterprise databases as application domains that provide a rationale for putting that much memory in a single server. MetaRAM claims that its own research indicates that 80 percent of enterprise server databases are under 500GB in size, and if this is true, then hosting those databases entirely in main memory could get a lot cheaper after today.

MetaRAM is a fabless semiconductor company, and its manufacturing partners are Hynix and SMART Modular. Both chipmakers are currently sampling 8GB DDR2 DIMMs, and MetaRAM expects to see servers and workstations that include the technology available from Rackable and launch partners later this quarter.

How it works

[waltky]

Super supercomputer...

Supercomputer performs 1,000 trillion calculations a second
9 June`08 WASHINGTON — Scientists unveiled the world's fastest supercomputer on Monday, a $100 million machine that for the first time has performed 1,000 trillion calculations per second in a sustained exercise.

The technology breakthrough was accomplished by engineers from the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the IBM Corp. on a computer to be used primarily on nuclear weapons work, including simulating nuclear explosions. The computer, named Roadrunner, is twice as fast as IBM's Blue Gene system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which itself is three times faster than any of the world's other supercomputers, according to IBM.

"The computer is a speed demon. It will allow us to solve tremendous problems," said Thomas D'Agostino, head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees nuclear weapons research and maintains the warhead stockpile. But officials said the computer also could have a wide range of other applications in civilian engineering, medicine and science, from developing biofuels and designing more fuel efficient cars to finding drug therapies and providing services to the financial industry.

To put the computer's speed in perspective, if every one of the 6 billion people on earth used a handheld computer and worked 24 hours a day it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner computer can do in a single day. The IBM and Los Alamos engineers worked six years on the computer technology.

MORE

See also:

Scientists compress music files 1000 times smaller than MP3s
Washington, April 2,`08 : Scientists at the University of Rochester have come up with a way to reproduce music into a computer file that's 1,000 times smaller than a comparable high-quality MP3 file.

The researchers demonstrated their methods by encoding a 20-second clarinet solo in less than a single kilobyte. The team said that the technology was made possible by two innovations: recreating in a computer both the real-world physics of a clarinet and the physics of a clarinet player.

The achievement is not yet a flawless reproduction of an original performance, but the researchers say it's getting close. "This is essentially a human-scale system of reproducing music," says Mark Bocko, professor of electrical and computer engineering and co-creator of the technology.

Humans can manipulate their tongue, breath, and fingers only so fast, so in theory we shouldn't really have to measure the music many thousands of times a second like we do on a CD. As a result, I think we may have found the absolute least amount of data needed to reproduce a piece of music," he added.

More Scientists compress music files 1000 times smaller than MP3s