Category Archives: Materials

Cashews, Datacenters and Imperial Pints

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Cloud BankWhen 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.’

Can parallel processing resurrect Moore’s Law?

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Forbes.com has published an interesting article about the end of Moore’s Law in the computer processing world. In 1975, Intel’s Gordon Moore wrote that computing power would double every year (later revised to every 1.5 years). This prediction held true for decades. Until now.

Bill Daily writes that in the last decade, Moore’s Law has ceased to hold true because energy consumption scaling has not been able to meet the demands of increased processor performance. Daily sees this slowing down of innovation as a “crisis”, but he offers a solution.

Bill Daily, who is Chief Scientist at NVIDIA, makes the case for parallel processing (using multiple CPUs and/or GPUs that run slower and more efficiently) as the answer to the end of Moore’s Law. Incidentally (or not), his company is at the forefront of such technology. Nevertheless, he proposes a very sound solution to keep increasing CPU performance in the short term.

But, he mentions no other alternatives to parallel processing. I have briefly covered on the blog research that is being conducted about materials other than silicon that could be used to make integrated circuits (such as graphene). It’s possible that these other approaches could also allow for the energy consumption scaling needed to resurrect Moore’s Law.

So while CPU performance improvements have not been charging ahead at the rate seen in the ’80s and ’90s, there are good reasons to be hopeful that other technologies will emerge to continue the race.

Graphene – the “new silicon”?

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The insideHPC blog reports that engineers at Ohio State University have used a local supercomputer to simulate microscopic manipulation of graphene, a one-atom-thick form of graphite. The engineers’ successful simulation and subsequent lab experiments have shown that graphene can perhaps become a superior substitute to silicon in electronics.

According to the Ohio Supercomputer Center website, “Researchers found that thin layers of graphite – the dark gray carbon material that fills most pencils – is highly stable, visible under the right conditions even when only one atom thick, stronger than steel and conducts electricity quickly and in exceptional ways.” The engineers’ research was published in the journal Advanced Materials.

This is an interesting development – perhaps one day silicon will be replaced with other materials such as graphene in electronics. According to Wikipedia, the first integrated circuit ever made, by Jack Kilby in 1958, was not made out of silicon but rather germanium. Half a year later, Robert Noyce created a circuit made of silicon.

(On a somewhat unrelated note, does anyone know why science articles on Wikipedia are so much longer than articles about the humanities? For instance, the article on graphene is longer and more heavily annotated than the article on Ancient Greece. There must be more scientists editing Wikipedia than historians or something.)