International Computer Concepts Blog

According to Science News, researchers at Rice University have created the first two-terminal, pure silicon memory chips, easily adaptable to nanoelectric manufacturing.

Researchers discovered that silicon oxide could replace carbon in the process. When an electric charge is sent through silicon oxide-an insulator-between semiconducting sheets of polycrystalline silicon, it forms a conductive pathway as small as 5 nanometers (billionths of a meter) wide. This process creates a two-terminal resistive switch, far smaller than current circuits in computer architectures.

By continuously breaking and connecting these nano strips, one creates robust and reliable memory bits.

“The beauty of it is its simplicity,” said Professor James Tour. That, he said, will be key to the technology’s scalability. Silicon oxide switches or memory locations require only two terminals, not three (as in flash memory), because the physical process doesn’t require the device to hold a charge.

The implications for chip manufacturers and the continuation of Moore’s Law holds the promise for this technology.

Micheal Feldman of HPCwire has written an interesting article about a startup company called Green Revolution Cooling (GRC) that has a competitive and innovative product in the server cooling market.

GRC has developed a server rack that lies horizontally on the floor and is filled with an oil-based cooling fluid. Any server that is built according to the standard form factor can slide into the rack and be cooled by the oil bath.

Servers stored in a liquid solution? For this stroke of innovation (actually, the idea is not entirely new, as Feldman notes, but this is its most recent reiteration) GRC has been selected as one of the “Disruptive Technologies of the Year” for SC ’09 and SC ’10.

So how can servers live underwater (actually, under oil, since oil does not conduct electricity) safely? GRC can take any standard server (including blades and GPUs), remove its fans, and seal it with a special coating to make it safe for oil immersion. According to GRC, 250,000+ server hours of testing their racks has not revealed any malfunctions due to the cooling system.

So what are the advantages of this new kind of cooling system? As Feldman states: “The solution is advertised to reduce the cooling energy by 90 percent and cut overall power consumption in the datacenter by up to 45 percent. The pitch is that a single 10kW server rack at 8 cents per kWh will save over $5,000 per year on energy costs alone.”

Although at least one large supercomputing location (the Texas Advanced Computing Center) has begun using these server racks with happy results, GRC is having a difficult time partnering with server manufacturers to cover their servers under warranty if they are used in a GRC rack.

There are various liquid-cooling solutions on the market, but GRC’s is one of the most creative and cost-effective. It is indeed disruptive technology with lots of cost-savings potential. If GRC can overcome the stigma in the market against dunking servers into liquid, its technology can perhaps become a key player in the cooling industry.

When I was a kid, there was a t.v. show called Beyond 2000. It showcased cutting edge technology that was supposed to change the way we worked and lived. I guess, at the time, the siren song of the millennium still held its allure. Then we got American Idol and it all went downhill.

I remember one episode, in Beyond 2000, where they talked about containers made from processed rice. The containers could be molded into any shape, used and then consumed.

And by consumed, I mean eaten.

Genius!

Here was the solution to all of our landfill, waste disposal issues. Make stuff out of food then eat it. Those toy packages with the enraging twist ties and artery severing edges, just chew through them. On a shopping spree and need a little pick me up? Consolidate your loot and have a little snack.

Fast forward twenty years and everything old is new again. Discovery News reports NEC Corporation announced the development of a first-of-its kind biomass-based plastic produced from non-edible plant resources, such as cashew shells. The product is durable enough to use in electronic equipment and could, by 2013, be in production.

Plants have natural cooling properties and if these plastics retain some of that quality, they could add an inherent cooling mechanism, to alleviate the high energy costs of computer components.

It could also lead sysadmins to wonder why,  to paraphrase the sage Kramer, ‘these rack-servers are making me thirsty.’

Like the antiquated American cars still driving on Cuban roads, China’s economy still runs on Five-Year Plans. With China’s growing wealth, the last few Five-Year Plans have been able to fund projects from the Chinese space program to developing green energy.

The latest Five-Year Plan is named China Next Generation Internet (CNGI). China is seeking to broaden its use of and role in the Internet community. Part of its strategy is to foster a homegrown industry of hardware and software and perhaps to eventually lead the markets in those areas.

One key industry that the Chinese government is focusing on is the processor market. An article in EE Times describes the new generation of Godson CPUs that are being developed under the leadership of the Beijing Institute of Computing Technology. The next generation is due out in 2011, but will still be a bit behind the market currently dominated by Intel and AMD.

The Godson 3B microchip will have eight cores and 65-nm parts, be 64-bit, and will incorporate vector processing (read more about the difference between scalar processing and other forms such as probability processing). Although most current processors on the market use less-robust scalar processing technology, China’s new CPUs will still be behind in the number of processor cores when they hit the market in 2011.

But the future for Chinese computing looks brighter. After 2011, the next generation of Godson CPUs will skip over the current standard of 45nm/32nm process technology and use 28nm instead. But some are skeptical that China can reach this benchmark. And once it does, perhaps Intel and AMD will be there too.

Nevertheless, China is an emerging player in the international CPU market, and, if it delivers on its promises, stands a good chance of competing against the big dogs: Intel and AMD.

“Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology…Better, stronger, faster.”
-from The Six Million Dollar Man

Memresistors and human engineering. Artificial intelligence and supercomputers. Biosynthetic corneal implants and facebook updates. What do these things have in common? The reliance on microprocessors? Hardly.

This technology might soon be packaged into a portable, rugged, ergonomically correct platform. The human skin.

From an article on DiscoveryNews, Hartmut Esslinger, founder and co-CEO of Frog Design, discusses the concept of Dattoos.

The concept of the Dattoo arose in response to current trends towards increasing connectivity and technology as self-expression. To realize a state of constant, seamless connectivity and computability required the convergence of technology and self. The body would need to literally become the interface. Computers and communication devices require physical space, surfaces, and energy. The idea of DNA tattoos (Dattoos) is to use the body itself as hardware and interaction platform, through the use of minimally-invasive, recyclable materials.

Technology is becoming ever more mobile. Moving from the centralized user interface, where platforms are static and require the presence of the individual at a specific location, to the roaming and portable medium we enjoy today. Allowing us to interact with the world, as we traverse it. Incorporating what it has to offer us, as we wish.

Tethering ourselves to devices. Requiring external components to conduct our business imposes layers of abstraction, no matter how small. They remove us, ever so slightly, from experiencing the world as  a pure construct.

Storing personal information in a secure medium, easily accessible and capable of interacting with any platform, has huge appeal. The trick is implementing this as yet unproven technology.

Not to mention getting past the sheer macabre implications of getting “hacked”.

In 1944, several of America’s most advanced  bomber planes, the B-29 Superfortress, landed in the Soviet Union. Years ahead of anything that the Soviets had in the way of strategic bombers at the time  (the B-29 was the plane used to drop the atomic bombs on Japan) Stalin hastily ordered that the design of the American airplane be understood. Over the protests of the Americans, the Soviets studied the construction of the planes, and, though they had no technical manuals of any kind, produced exact working replicas of the bombers under the name Tupolev Tu-4. These planes served in the Soviet Air Force for many years.

This process – studying a complicated system, frequently in order to replicate it – is called reverse engineering. And scientists, in a less hostilely plagiaristic form, are currently working to perform the same technique on the human brain.

An article titled “Reverse Engineering of Human Brain Likely by 2020” on Gizmodo.com talks about the potential for making computers think like humans do. There are two major challenges:

1. Computational power – currently, as the article notes, even our best supercomputers lack the sheer power to calculate as much as the human brain. What is required is estimated, from the complexity of the genome base pairs that code the brain, as “a computational capacity of at least 36.8 petaflops and a memory capacity of 3.2 petabytes – a scale that supercomputer technology isn’t expected to hit for at least three years”.
2. Complexity – the brain functions in ways that are very different from the linear way of computation that most computers utilize. Although some groups are hoping to move beyond the linear model and are exploring parallel and other forms of processing, this is undoubtedly the greatest challenge and will take much longer than three years to resolve.

Computers that can one day think like humans is a humbling thought. Just like the Industrial Revolution edged out the individual craftsman, so too may computers that think like us one day replace the “brain jobs” that have become so prevalent in the modern age. But that, thankfully for those of us who work with our brains, is many, many years away.

A team from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology created a router, built from parts found in most high-end desktop computers, that transmits data at nearly 40 GBps.

The technique used by the scientists could lead to the development of cheap commodity chips, replacing the custom made hardware in high performance routers. The software could lead to the development of new techniques and protocols to replace the decades old infrastructure, on which the Internet currently runs.

Routers use custom hardware to route traffic between networks. Software routers use software to perform the same function. Most commercial software products can only achieve speeds of 3GB, far below the 10Gbps of common hardware. The Korean researchers developed a program called Packetshader which uses GPUs to process data packets at nearly 40GBps.

Routers manipulate data packets in myriad ways and this “parallel” processing is where the GPU really shines. Able to handle multiple data packets at once, such as encryption and authentication, it allows the CPU to perform serial operations on the data, such as packet processing to detect network breach attempts.

Gianluca Iannaccone, an engineer at Intel Labs Berkeley familiar with the software, says it could reduce the number of physical machines needed to comprise a Terabit-per-second software router, to one-third of what his research has previously indicated would be required.

“One Terabit is the entry point for enterprise-grade routers–the routers in the core of the Internet,” says Iannaccone. If enough 40Gb software routers are connected, you create a 1TB router. These clusters could one day form routers made up entirely of software.

“We can expect killer apps out of this,” added KyoungSoo Park, who was also involved. “You can build an interesting packet- or network-management system on top of a PC-based software router that can’t be implemented with a hardware router. Ultimately, you can experiment with new protocols that are not used in today’s Internet.”

Used in combination with technology like Openflow, we could develop scalable, energy-efficient data networks to replace  our current infrastructure.

Last week, to the surprise of many in the IT industry, Intel bought the computer security company McAfee. In an article on CIOUpdate.com, Larry Barrett insightfully describes the business context in which this acquisition was made.

During the recession that began in 2008, and even before it, technology companies have been focusing on innovating and diversifying their services. Google and Apple have been long-time leaders in this trend, especially in the mobile revolution. Oracle and Cisco, Barrett notes, have not been far behind in branching out of their traditional offerings.

Now, Intel is feeling the pressure of several years’ worth of low stock prices despite its considerable advancement of CPU technology and consistent quarterly profits. It seems that investors are not valuing these short-term gains and have feared that Intel is falling behind in the business arena.

Enter Intel’s last week purchase of McAfee, Inc. With this move, according to Barrett, Intel hopes to develop the technology of computer security at the microchip level, despite the current standard of protecting networks and programs at the operating-system and software realms. More importantly, Intel hopes this relatively new approach will catch on in the mobile market, where the digital security industry is having a hard time coping with the tremendous output of new devices and applications.

This is a risky move, as many commentators are skeptical of the very idea of security at the micro-hardware level. But if this gambit pays off, Intel could well be years ahead of the competition in providing secure processing power to smart phones and other mobile devices. Even Intel’s competitor, AMD, had struck outside its strict business boundaries when it purchased ATI Technologies in 2006 and claimed a stake in the GPU market.

As Barrett’s article makes clear, Intel had no choice but to make a bold move. In a business environment where doing strictly what you do well is not enough (in the eyes of investors), a company needs to change. This is a good thing, it seems to me. Imagine how much we would have missed out on if Google had just remained a search engine company or Apple had just continued to build outdated desktop PCs.

For the past few years, processing technology has been steadily trying to break out of the typical x86 CPU mold that has been the standard since the 1970s. Since GPUs (graphics processing units) have emerged, traditional processing methods have been augmented with the vector computing approach of those units working in conjunction with CPUs.

Now, new types of processors are being developed that will take computing even further. As HPCWire reports, a company called Lyric Semiconductor is launching a line of products that will tackle computation in an entirely different way than the current linear method with Boolean gates that standard x86 processors employ. In other words, Lyric Semiconductor is chucking the 0s and 1s, the fundamentals of computer programming for the past half-century, out the window.

The method Lyric has been developing is based on probability processing. Michael Feldman of HPCWire describes how current computing applications have outgrown the linear model:

The goal is to construct hardware circuitry and software purpose-built for probability applications. With conventional digital technology, processing has to follow a strictly linear path. This is fine for software like operating systems, spreadsheets, word processing, and database transactions, where the computing consists of straightforward calculations or data movement. “But most of the interesting things happening nowadays don’t really fit into that model,” says Reynolds. . .That encompasses a wide range of applications including Web searching, financial modeling, genome sequence analysis, speech recognition, climate modeling, credit fraud detection, spam filtering, and financial modeling, among many others. People tend to associate these probability-based applications with human-like intelligence, and this is clearly where software, in general, is moving.

Lyric is ambitious, and this new form of processing could eventually overtake traditional CPUs in supercomputing applications. As the above article describes, new computing languages are being written that are customized for probability processing. As computers are programmed to think more and more like humans, the hardware that goes into them will continue to evolve beyond the linear modes of x86 computing.

As Data Center Knowledge reports, a proof-of-concept is currently being developed for a cargo vessel to be used as a dedicated data center. The effort is being led by International Data Security (IDS), a relatively new company, which began the project in 2008 but experienced financial setbacks until this month, when it announced that they are continuing the project. According to the article, Google also began designing a floating data center in 2008, but has not revealed any more information about the current status of this project.

The IDS is commandeering an old training ship from the California Maritime Academy to create a working prototype of its idea. Although the Navy has been deploying data centers on its combat vessels for many years, IDS would be creating the first ship that is specifically dedicated to housing a data center.

The first prototype vessel is not being built as a modular data center, although once the concept is proven, that may be the method of deploying servers throughout future ships. The benefits of having a dedicated data center at sea are that the ocean provides a natural coolant for heated servers, ships are supposedly less prone to natural land disasters like earthquakes and fires, and, as one commentator on the above article noted, a ship can travel and dock between states to take advantage of more favorable tax rates.

Although various practical hurdles still have to be overcome (another commentator noted that materials stored near ports can seep into a docked data center and potentially disrupt the electronics), floating server rooms are just one of many innovative ideas to cool and deploy data centers.