IBM & Los Alamos supercomputer might be as fast as your brain.

Not even a week after the new Roadrunner supercomputer was juiced up and put to work, scientists are hard at work trying to push the machine to its limits. Housed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the primary goal of the supercomputer is to model the safety of the United States' aging nuclear weapons stockpile. At over a certified petaflop, the machine renders calculations in a day that would take every person on Earth a calculator and 46 years to accomplish.

A supercomputer of this power will be incredibly useful for modeling things other than nuclear decay and global climate. At over a quadrillion – a million billion – calculations per second, Roadrunner is the only computer on Earth that can keep up with one of the few things more amazing than itself: the human brain.

Los Alamos researchers are putting this power to work with a program dubbed PetaVision. The program was created to model neuron and synapse interaction in the visual cortex of the human brain. The brain uses over a billion neurons and trillions of synapses alone to process the visual information it receives and is one of the most complicated processes known to exist in grey matter.

Supercomputers like Roadrunner bring new possibilities for modeling human recognition systems, and the advances are not likely to stop there. In the past, computers have been unable to flawlessly perform cognitive tasks that the human brain does easily; tasks like picking out a face in a crowd, or detecting oncoming vehicles in traffic. Such a large step up in processing power may enable scientists to breech this difficult wall in mimicry.

The researchers used PetaVision to set a processing record with Roadrunner, spinning up to an astonishing 1.144 petaflop/s. "Just a week after formal introduction of the machine to the world, we are already doing computational tasks that existed only in the realm of imagination a year ago,” explains Terry Wallace, associate director for Science, Technology and Engineering at Los Alamos.

The supercomputer's architecture is based on a hybrid node system. Each node contains two AMD Opteron dual-core and four PowerXCell 8i processers. The PowerXCell CPUs are derived from the same Cell processor used in the Sony Playstation 3 and act as computational accelerators for the Opterons.

Source from DailyTech

Intel says open host controller specifications have cost gazillions of dollars to develop

According to Intel’s Nick Knupffer, there are a lot of myths going around concerning USB 3.0 and Intel’s involvement in the development of the specification. Knupffer wrote a blog post on Intel’s website in an attempt to dispel these myths.

Knupffer points out that Intel is not developing the USB 3.0 specification. What Intel is developing is the host controller spec which Knupffer describes as a “Dummies Guide” to building a USB 3.0 compatible piece of silicon.

Knupffer says in the blog post that Intel has invested “gazillions of dollars and bazillions of engineering man hours” in developing the open host controller and despite its significant investment still plans to give the specification to competing manufacturers for free. Knupffer also says that Intel loves it when CPU performance is used to the max and the huge increase in bandwidth of USB 3.0 will mean larger file transfers and more processor usage. This in turn is expected to lead to an increased demand for faster processors.

AMD and NVIDIA leveled allegations at Intel recently that claim Intel was withholding the open host controller specifications in an attempt to give itself a market advantage. Intel and AMD claim that by withholding the specification the lead Intel will have in bringing USB 3.0 compliant products to market will be in the six to nine month range.

Intel denied the allegations of withholding the open host controller specifications at the time AMD and NVIDIA made their charges public and announced they would be designing their own open host controller. In Knupffer’s blog post, he again says that Intel isn’t holding the open host controller specifications back from competitors.

According to Knupffer, the significant investment in the open host controller specifications is specifically to get USB 3.0 into the market faster, so why would it withhold the specification. Intel still maintains that the specifications aren’t ready and that it plans to give the specifications to other manufacturers in the second half of 2008.

The final myth that Knupffer addresses in his post is that USB 3.0 technology borrows heavily from technology used in PCI Express. Intel points out that it was involved with both the PCI-SIG and the USB-IF at the design stage for both PCI Express and for USB 3.0. The insinuation form Intel is that the technology that is similar in both devices was developed on its dime.

Source from DailyTech

Water conservation has been a widely encouraged practice for the better part of six or seven decades. Though along the way various forms of water transport and purification have sprung up, making life a little easier for people in climates that often experience droughts or simply live in deserts, it still remains an important part of day-to-day life in some of those. Most denizens of cities are probably familiar with the idea, but as most modern cities are well-plumbed, it doesn't add up to quiet the level of importance.

In Europe, according to English nongovernmental organization Waterwise, the water used by washing machines in the UK has risen 23 percent in the last 15 years, accounting for some 13 percent of daily consumption. Overall, the daily usage weighs in at around 455 million liters.

While 13 percent doesn't seem like a great deal and some may say that other things, like sanitary appliances should be examined for efficiency first, being more wasteful on the whole, the fact that nearly every single resident of a village, town, burb or city will have to at some point wash clothes, a more efficient machine to do so could be well-received in many locals.

Enter the Xeros. The washing machine, developed at the University of Leeds, breaks all previous efficiency records. It uses just a single cup of water for an entire load. The revolutionary machine could be in production as early as next year, according to Xeros Ltd, a company created specifically to develop and market the appliance.

Instead of soaking the load in water and detergent, the Xeros uses about 20 kilograms of small plastic chips to gather dirt and other particles which are dissolved by the single cup of water throughout the wash cycle. The chips measure about half a centimeter in size and though the developers recommend using fresh chips in each load, can be reused up to 100 times.

“This is one of the most surprising and remarkable technologies I've encountered in recent years,” said Dr. Rob Rule, director of Xeros Ltd. “Xeros has the ability to save billions of litres of water per year and, we believe, the potential to revolutionise the global laundry market.”

Source from DailyTech

Traditionally, 1.8" HDDs were only available with a 4200 RPM spindle speed, but the boost to 5400 RPM was a welcome addition to help improve performance on the smallest notebooks and UMPCs.
At the time of the announcement, Toshiba announced the availability of 80GB and 120GB models. Today, Toshiba's 5400 RPM 1.8" lineup is expanding to include a 160GB model and a revamped 80GB model.

The new 160GB (MK1617GSG) drive uses two platters while its new 80GB (MK8017GSG) counterpart used a single platter -- Toshiba's 80GB offering launched in February required two platters to reach the same capacity. Both drives feature 8MB of cache, 15ms average seek time, a micro-SATA connectors and comply with SATA 2.6 specifications.

"Toshiba's eight years in perfecting 1.8-inch HDD technology puts us in a unique position to address explosive growth in the mobility segment with proven products that deliver the performance and capacity that system manufacturers need," said Toshiba Storage Device Division Marketing VP, Maciek Brzeski.

At these capacities, our 1.8-inch HDDs are enabling the miniaturization of mobile PCs by providing better power consumption efficiency and improved ruggedness over larger form factors."

Toshiba’s new mobile HDDs will be available to OEMs in August of this year.

Toshiba's recent development in the area of 1.8" HDDs should give it more ammunition to go up against the increasing performance and falling costs of solid state drives (SSDs). Super Talent is currently leading all players in the SSD field by further driving down costs and recently introduced 30GB, 60GB, and 120GB 1.8" SSDs priced at $299, $449, and $679 respectively.

Source from DailyTech

Canon announced this week that it would be adding a new D-SLR camera to its line in the U.S. and other countries. The new camera will be the Canon EOS Rebel XS. The Rebel XS will replace both the Rebel XT and XTi.
The Rebel XS gets a 2.5-inch LCD, 10-megapixel sensor and Live View feature. Live View allows you to frame a shot with the LCD and see the image live just like you would through the view finder.

The XS has a 7-point autofocus system and can shoot bursts at 3 fps until your memory card fills up. The camera saves images to SD/SDHC cards rather than the much more expensive CompactFlash cards of higher-end D-SLR cameras.

The kit lens included with the Rebel XS is an image stabilized EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 lens. Bundling a lens with image stabilization will help first time users of DSLR cameras get better shots. The Rebel XS will sit in the Canon line directly below the Rebel XSi.

Other features of the Rebel XS include integrated sensor cleaning system, shutter speed of 30 seconds to 1/4000 of a second and 12-bit analog to digital conversion. The battery used by the Rebel XS is a LP-E5 with 1080 mAH and the XS is compatible with a wired remote.

Pricing for the new Rebel XS is not yet announced, but its big brother the Rebel XSi retails in the $799 to $899 range. That would likely put the Rebel XS at about $200 less than the XSi. The EOS Rebel XTi the Rebel XS is replacing was first introduced way back in 2006.

Source from DailyTech

The storage capacity and performance of hard drives used by desktop computers is growing all the time. Capacity isn’t the only thing to consider with a hard drive; the read/ write performance and cache size comes into play as well.
Western Digital has introduced a new Caviar Black line of hard drives that is available in both 750GB and 1TB storage capacities. The new drives have twice the normal cache size of typical drives with 32MB of high-performance cache memory. The Black edition drives also feature dual electronics architecture processors for twice the processing power.

The motor shaft on the drives is secured at both ends to reduce vibration and the technology is dubbed StableTrac. Western Digital also uses NoTouch ramp technology that prevents the recording head from touching the media for reduced wear and longer operational life. The Caviar Black line uses SATA 3.0 interface. The buffer to disk transfer rate is 145MB/s max.

The Caviar Black drives can withstand operating shock of 30G and a non-operating shock of 250G. At idle the drive produces 24 dBA of sound, seek mode 0 produces 33 dBA, and seek mode 3 produces 29 dBA of sound. The rotational speed of the drives is 7200 RPM.

Both the 750GB and 1TB drives will be available next week with the 750GB retailing for $199 and the 1TB retailing for $249. Western Digital didn’t comment on the platter size used in the new Black drives. Western Digital recently moved to 334GB platters for some of its other 1TB Caviar drives.

Source from DailyTech

New binoculars use brain waves to activate enemy detection algorithms based on threat response

The enemy is the area. You scan the perimeter alert, tense. Your pulse races.

In the past such situations called for constant surveillance via binoculars either discrete or in headgear to try to spot the approaching enemy. However, such binoculars were limited by reaction times and luck, and the skilled enemy could sneak up on friendly forces and catch them unaware.

Northrop Grumman Corporation, a major defense contractor, is looking to solve this problem and take binoculars and imaging technology into the next century. The company is leading a consortium of academia and industry that has just received an award to begin design prototypes of its panoramic binocular day/night system that uses brain wave monitoring to trigger target detection and alert soldiers of threats.

Brain wave monitoring is nothing new. The consumer industry this year received some device sporting the technology in the form of brain mice. Users found the new mice to be particularly handy in first-person-shooter games, but also handy in analyzing stress responses for mediation and athletics.

The new Cognitive Technology Threat Warning System program, or CT2WS, is a logical extension of these ideas and is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Its goal is to not only provide the soldier with an extremely wide, panoramic field of view, but to also implement a neuro-optical interface to trigger target detection for fast-moving, elusive targets. The first phase of objectives for the project is to develop the basic circuit model for the device on a breadboard and to complete the Human-aided Optical Recognition/Notification of Elusive Threats (HORNET) system, which will include the brain interface and the threat detection algorithms.

The HORNET utilizes special electro-encephalogram electrodes sandwiched in a custom helmet against the scalp. These electrodes provide constant monitoring of the soldier's electrical brain activity. Over time, the system will learn and be trained. By accepting whether a soldier is in a threatening situation or not, and comparing it to their brain response, the system will learn to recognize combat situations and react appropriately.

Michael House, Northrop Grumman's CT2WS program manager states, "Northrop Grumman's HORNET system leverages the latest advances in real-time coupling of human brain activity with automated cognitive neural processing to provide superior target detection. The system will maintain persistent surveillance in order to defeat an enemy's attempts to surprise through evasive move-stop-move tactics, giving the U.S. warfighter as much as a 20-minute advantage over his adversaries."

The system will be put to use both at home and abroad. Among its possible uses are border patrol, IED detection, and active combat in areas like Iraq. The initial phase of development will take 12 months and will grant up to $6.7 million to the project.

Among the many collaborators with Northrop Grumman on the project are SAIC, San Diego, Calif.; Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Ga.; Theia Technologies LLC, Wilsonville, Ore.; Sensics, Inc., Baltimore, Md.; L-3 Communications Infrared Products, Dallas, Texas; Georgetown University, Wash., D.C.; Portland State University, Portland, Ore.; and the University of Colorado, Boulder, Colo.

Source from DailyTech

With all the hoopla surrounding the announcement of the iPhone 3G, it’s pretty easy for other new products to get lost in all the madness. HP is looking to generate a bit of buzz of its own with two new computing products, but it unfortunately doesn’t have the power of the press to generate the insatiable tongue wagging that comes with a new Apple release.

That being said, HP’s latest new high-end products cover both the desktop and notebook fronts in the form of the Voodoo Omen gaming desktop and the Voodoo Envy 133 business laptop.

For gamers that have no limit on how much they are willing to spend on a gaming rig, look no further than Voodoo Omen. The towering desktop features a customizable, all-aluminum case design which can be optioned with Voodoo Allure paints and glass, leather, or wood side panels. Other exterior adornments include a 7" color auxiliary display (800x480) built into the front of the case to display game stats, movies, music videos, etc.


Other features include the ability to rotate the motherboard to plug in system cables from the top of the case, tool-less side panels, eight Voodoo Ink laser engraving designs, RGB accent lighting, and the ability to choose from five different colors for the liquid coolant.

When it comes to hard specs, the Voodoo Omen comes equipped with an ASUS Striker Extreme II motherboard which is paired with either an Intel Core 2 Extreme Quad-Core 3.20GHz QX9770 or 3.00GHz QX9650 processor. Up to 8GB of 1600 MHz CORSAIR PC-14400 DDR3 can be ordered with the system as well. As expected with a high-end gaming rig, the Voodoo Omen supports NVIDIA SLI and ATI CrossFireX graphics options.

For those that truly want to splurge on storage options, the Voodoo Omen can be equipped with up to six 64GB Samsung single-level cell (SLC) solid-state drives (SSDs).

The customizable nature of the Voodoo Omen's chassis and the wealth of hardware choices mean that the gaming rig starts at a whopping $6,500. Checking off every option on the spec sheet will cause the price to balloon to $20,000.

On the notebook side of things, Voodoo is also announcing its 13.3" Envy 133. The notebook is just 0.70 inches thick (making it thinner than a MacBook Air) and weighs 3.373-pounds. Despite its thin chassis and light weight, Voodoo managed to cram quite a potent processor under the hood along with enough connectivity options to make certain Mac owners a bit jealous.

Processing power comes from either an Intel Core 2 Duo SP7000 (1.8GHz) or SP7500 (1.6GHz) processor. The 13.3" WXGA display is LED-backlit and is powered by an integrated Intel GMA X3100 graphics processor. Storage options include your choice of an 80GB 4200 RPM HDD or a 64GB SDD while optical duties are handled by an eSATA Super-Multi drive.

Voodoo also takes a page from Apple's playbook by including a gesturing touchpad which supports “multiple finger tracking, supporting chiral scrolling, pinch and momentum gestures”.

When it comes to port selection and wireless options, Voodoo doesn't disappoint. The Voodoo Envy comes equipped with one USB 2.0 port, one eSATA/USB 2.0 combo port, an ExpressCard 34 slot, and HDMI. Wireless duties are handled by an Intel 802.11n adapter and Bluetooth 2.0 is also included -- integrated mobile broadband is optional. As an added bonus, the Voodoo Envy's power adapter doubles as a WiFi access point.

The Voodoo Envy starts at $2,099.

Source from DailyTech

Scientist cook up a cooler way to produce polyethylene thin films.

One would pretty much have to be living under a rock in a developed nation to not have encountered polyethylene. The chains of ethylene or ethene monomers comprise a vast amount of products, from the ubiquitous plastic bag to film to implants. PE comes in various forms and densities and over 60 million tons of the material are produced yearly.

Though the production of PE is not particularly difficult in bulk, making ultra-thin films of the polymer have been notably more time and energy consuming. Typically, engineers create a dilute solution from an organic solvent and the polymer. To break up the crystalline structure of the polymer, heat must be applied to the solution. The solution can then be applied to a surface and the film forms when the solvent is cooled or removed.

A new method, devised by scientists at the University of Konstanz, removes the need for heating to dissolve the polymer into a solution by creating an aqueous solution of nanoscale crystals from the start. The catalyzation process involves ethylene and nickel complexes and produces crystals of about 25nm by 6nm in size.

To produce the film, droplets of the solution are applied to glass slides which are spun at 2,000 revolutions per minute. The spinning process removes the non-polymer substances. When all is said and done, a thin film of about 50nm in thickness is left behind.

The key to this technique lies in an amorphous, or non-crystalline, layer of PE on each of the crystals. Though the coating measures about 1nm in thickness, the interaction between each crystal's is very strong, holding the crystals in place while under the effects of the high speed spin.

Ultra-thin polymer coatings, especially polymers like polyethylene, which are completely harmless and environmentally inert, could be used for vast array of technologies from medical to electronics. Thin polymer films are already under investigation for uses in applications like bacterial growth prevention and incredibly durable rechargeable batteries.

Source from DailyTech

Roadrunner supercomputer is first to break petaflop barrier

A new supercomputer in the U.S. has broken a barrier that many thought wouldn’t be broken for years to come. A new supercomputer-- dubbed Roadrunner-- has broken the petaflop barrier.
Roadrunner was designed by engineers and scientists at IBM and the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Ultimately, Roadrunner will be placed into a classified environment where it will be used to simulate what effects aging has on the stockpile of nuclear weapons the U.S. has in its arsenal. The problem it will work on is modeling how aging nuclear weapons behave the first fraction of a second during an explosion. Before beginning its nuclear weapons research, Roadrunner will be used to model the effects of global warming.

The Roadrunner supercomputer costs $133 million and is built using chips from both consumer electronics and more common server processors.

Roadrunner has 12,960 chips that are an improved version of the Cell chip used in the PS3. These Cell processors act as a turbocharger for certain portions of the calculations the Roadrunner processes. The computer also uses a smaller, unspecified number of AMD Opteron processors.

A computer researcher from the University of Tennessee, Jack Dongarra told the New York Times, “This [breaking the petaflop barrier] is equivalent to the four-minute mile of supercomputing.”

Horst Simon from the Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory said, “Roadrunner tells us about what will happen in the next decade. Technology is coming from the consumer electronics market and the innovation is happening first in terms of cell phones and embedded electronics.”

Technology first appearing in the consumer electronics market and then making its way into supercomputing is a stark contrast to a process that commonly works in the exact opposite manner.

In total, Roadrunner has 116,640 processing cores and the real challenge for programmers is figuring out how to keep all of those processing cores in use simultaneously to get the best performance. Roadrunner requires about 3 megawatts of power, or about enough electricity to run a large shopping center.

To put the processing power in perspective, Thomas P. D’Agostino of the National Nuclear Security Administration said that if all 6 billion people on Earth entered calculations on a calculator for 24 hours a day, seven days per week it would take 46 years to do what Roadrunner can do in one day.

How Roadrunner is cooled is unknown, IBM has recently moved to liquid cooling for its supercomputers, but Roadrunner appears to be air cooled.

Source from DailyTech

AMD and NVIDIA say Intel won't share its USB 3.0 open host controller specs

The USB 3.0 specification is expected to be out in 2009 and will significantly upgrade the bandwidth of the current USB 2.0 ports and products that all computer users are familiar with. The body responsible for the support and promotion of the USB specifications going back to USB 1.1 is the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF).
The USB-IF was founded by Intel in 1995 along with other industry players including Microsoft, HP, Texas Instruments, NEC and NXP Semiconductors. Currently, the USB-IF and its members are working to bring the USB 3.0 specification to market. USB 3.0 is also being called “PCI Express over cable” because the USB 3.0 specification uses intellectual property that was sourced from the PCI SIG. USB 3.0 will increase the bandwidth offered by USB 2.0 by 10 times with a data throughput of about 5 gigabits per second.

Despite the fact that much of the intellectual property behind the USB 3.0 specification wasn’t developed by Intel, AMD and NVIDIA both assert that Intel is keeping crucial information concerning the open host controller to itself. According to NVIDIA and AMD, Intel has working silicon, meaning the open host controller portion is mature and working, yet Intel is refusing to give the specifications to other processor and chipset makers.

AMD and NVIDIA say that by withholding the open host controller specifications that Intel is basically giving itself a market advantage of six to nine months because of the time lag between receiving the host controller specifications by other CPU and chipset makers and getting product to the marketplace.

An Intel source told News.com, “Intel only gives it [open host controller specifications] out once it's finished. And it's not finished. If it was mature enough to release, it would be released. If you have an incomplete spec and give it out to people, these people will build their chipsets and you'll end up with chipsets that are incompatible with devices. That's what (Intel) is trying to avoid."

The Intel source continued saying, “[Intel is] a little bit behind and that's what might be causing some of the resentment. You could take the opinion that Intel is giving stuff out for free and people are complaining because (Intel) isn't giving it out fast enough.”

If Intel feels that AMD and NVIDIA aren’t willing to do the hard work of developing the open host controller for USB 3.0 themselves, it may be very mistaken. AMD and NVIDIA say they are going to develop their own open host controller for USB 3.0. Both firms point out that developing a separate open host controller could very well mean incompatibilities between USB 3.0 controllers and products.

An AMD source told News.com, “We are starting development on it [open host controller] right now.” An NVIDIA source says the first meeting of the alternate open host controller specification is set for next week and adds, "We fully intend to productize this spec.”

Intel maintains that it is not withholding the specification and that it will provide the details for the open host controller when it is complete.

Intel is in hot water already for some of its business practices. The FTC announced last week that it will investigate whether Intel has abused its market position to stifle competition.