First thing’s first: the video beyond the break is certainly not up to our usually stellar standards. That said, the voice recording is clear enough, so you may consider it an audio presentation with the bonus of a shadowy figure making occasional hand gestures in time with what’s being said (lighting also improves as you go along). Arimasa Naitoh is the man behind the ThinkPad line, having joined the product engineering team at IBM during the 1970s and shifting with the ThinkPad brand on to Lenovo in 2005. Currently the VP for Notebook Development and the head of the Yamato Development Labs, Naitoh-san was kind enough to do a presentation in London yesterday, in which he touched on the history of the fabled laptop line and was also not shy about trumpeting the key advantages of the latest T400s flagship model. So click past the break, turn your speakers up, and get educated by one of the true founding fathers of mobile computing as we know it today.
IBM’s Cell processor may have helped break a few records and find its way into everything from video game consoles to TVs at the same time, but it looks like things could be about to change in a fairly big way for Big Blue’s groundbreaking chip. According to Heise Online, IBM Vice President of Deep Computing David Turek has confirmed that the company’s current PowerXCell-8i processor will be the last of its kind, and that there will not be a successor with dual PowerPC processors and 32 SPEs as originally planned. Slightly less clear, however, is the future of the Cell program in general, which will apparently live on in “another form” — to which Turek reportedly added, somewhat vaguely, “the future is hybrid,” although we’re fairly certain he’s not talking about cars.
Almost exactly a year ago we noted DARPA pouring nearly $5 million into an IBM project to develop a computer capable of emulating the brain of a living creature. Having already modeled half of a mouse’s brain, the researchers were at that time heading toward the more ambitious territory of feline intelligence, and today we can report on how far that cash injection and extra twelve months have gotten us. The first big announcement is that they have indeed succeeded in producing a computer simulation on par, in terms of complexity and scale, with a cat’s brain. The second, perhaps more important, is that “jaw-dropping” progress has been made in the sophistication and detail level of human brain mapping. The reverse engineering of the brain is hoped to bring about new ways for building computers that mimic natural brain structures, an endeavor collectively termed as “cognitive computing.” Read link will reveal more, and you can make your own cyborg jokes in the comments below.
Thirty-three years after the first Cray-1 supercomputer, the company is still cranking them out. Now the Cray XT5 “Jaguar” just won the title of world’s fastest computer, displacing the IBM Roadrunner that held the title for the previous 18 months, InformationWeek reports.
The Jaguar features six-core AMD Opteron processors, nearly a quarter million total CPU cores, and managed to hit 1.75 petaflops per second on the Linpack benchmark used by researchers in determining the biannual Top500 list. That’s compared with the Roadrunner’s 1.04 petaflop/s rating. (A petaflop/s is one quadrillion calculations per second.)
Of the top 500 machines in the list, 399 use Intel processors, 52 employ IBM Power chips, and AMD brings up third place in popularity with 42 systems. HP and IBM together account for building almost 400 of the 500 computers. Anyone for Crysis benchmarks?
Researchers at IBM have found a way to meld biology and computing to create a new chip that could become the basis for a fast, inexpensive, personal genetic analyzer. The DNA sequencer involves drilling tiny nanometer-size holes through computer-like silicon chips, then passing DNA strands through them to read the information contained in their genetic code.
“We are merging computational biology and nanotechnology skills to produce something that will be very useful to the future of medicine,” Gustavo Stolovitzky, an IBM researcher, told Wired.com.
The “DNA transistor” could make it faster and cheaper to sequence individuals’ complete genomes. In so doing, it could help facilitate advances in bio-medical research and personalized medicine. For instance, having access to a person’s genetic code could help doctors create customized medicine and determine an individual’s predisposition to certain diseases or medical conditions.
Such a device could also reduce the cost of personalized genome analysis to under $1,000. In comparison, the first complete sequencing of a human genome, done by the Human Genome Project, cost about $3 billion when it was finally completed in 2003. Since then, other efforts have attempted to achieve something similar for a much lower cost. Stanford researcher Stephen Quake recently showed the Heliscope Single Molecule Sequencer that can sequence a human genome in about four weeks at a cost of $1 million. Services such as 23&me offer DNA testing for much less, but only do partial scans, identifying markers for specific diseases and genetic traits rather than mapping the entire genome.
Because of the expense, so far only seven individuals’ genomes have been fully sequenced. IBM’s personalized DNA readers, if successful, could extend that privilege to many more people.
“If there’s a chance that this could go behind the counter at hospitals, clinics and someday even a black bag then it would change how we approach medicine,” says Richard Doherty, research director at consulting firm Envisioneering Group. “All it would take is a simple test to look at anyone genes.”
DNA, or Deoxyribonucleic acid, contains the instructions needed for an organism to develop, survive and reproduce. A gene comprises the set of instructions needed to make a single protein. For humans, the complete genome contains about 20,000 genes on 23 pairs of chromosomes.
IBM scientists hope to change that by taking advantage of current chip-fabrication technology. Researchers took a 200-millimeter silicon-wafer chip and drilled a 3-nanometer-wide hole (known as a nanopore) through it. A nanometer is one one-billionth of a meter or about 100,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair.
The DNA is passed through the nanopore. To control the speed at which it flows through the pore, researchers developed a device that has a multilayer metal and dielectric structure, says Steve RossNagel, a researcher at IBM’s Watson lab in New York.
This metal-dielectric structure holds the nanopore. A modulated electric field between the metal layers traps the DNA in the nanopore. Since the molecule is easily ionized, voltage drops across the nanopore help “pull” the DNA through. By cyclically turning on and off these gate voltages, scientists can move the DNA through the pore at a rate of one nucleotide per voltage cycle –- a rate the researchers believe would make the DNA readable. IBM hasn’t specified how fast a strand of DNA can be read, though researchers say a fully functional device could sequence the entire genome in “hours.”
Ultimately, several such nanopores can run parallel on a chip to create a complete genomic analyzer.
Though researchers have figured out the basics, it could still take up to three years to get a working prototype. The challenge now is to slow and control the motion of the DNA through the hole so the reader can accurately decode what is in the DNA.
They also need to determine exactly how the DNA will be decoded when it passes through the nanopore. It’s an area of “intense research” within and outside of IBM, says Stolovitzky. One way to do it would be to measure the electrical properties of the different DNA bases such as capacitance and conductivity.
“This is a knowledge that most people would like to have,” says RossNagel. “If we could have a big enough database of human genomes then you can see the interplay of genetics. That would change how we approach medicine.”
Top Photo: A cross section of IBM’s DNA Transistor simulated on the Blue Gene supercomputer shows a single stranded DNA moving in the midst of invisible water molecules through the nanopore/ IBM
In the video below, IBM researchers explain how they came up with the idea for the DNA Transistor. The video includes an animated simulation showing a DNA strand moving through the nanopore.
Electric cars certainly can look nice and promise big things, but the ones we can actually buy today rarely top 50 miles of range. Those promised for the next few years probably won’t break 100, and they’re not going to find wide success until things get a lot better in that department. That’s the initiative of IBM’s Battery 500 Project, bringing together a number of the brightest minds in anode/cathode tech to boost battery storage density by a factor of 10. The focus is on lithium-air technology, which uses nanoscale semiconductors and an open design relying on the air around us for collecting positive ions. About 40 brains are involved in the project at this point, and we think their work is of vital importance. So, if you would, please stop posting funny things on the internet until they’ve come up with a solution. We’d like them to be able to focus completely without any LOLcat distractions.
Sometimes genius looks like an elegant equation written in chalk on a blackboard. Sometimes it’s a hodgepodge of wires, canisters and aluminum-foil-wrapped hoses, all held together by shiny bolts.
Despite its homebrew appearance, this device, a scanning tunneling microscope, is one of the most extraordinary lab instruments of the last three decades. It can pick up individual atoms one by one and move them around to create supersmall structures, a fundamental requirement for nanotechnology.
Twenty years ago this week, on Sept. 28, 1989, an IBM physicist, Don Eigler, became the first person to manipulate and position individual atoms. Less than two months later, he arranged 35 Xenon atoms to spell out the letters IBM. Writing those three characters took about 22 hours. Today, the process would take about 15 minutes.
“We wanted to show we could position atoms in a way that’s very similar to how a child builds with Lego blocks,” says Eigler, who works at IBM’s Almaden Research Center. “You take the blocks where you want them to go.”
Eigler’s breakthrough has big implications for computer science. For instance, researchers are looking to build smaller and smaller electronic devices. They hope, someday, to engineer these devices from the ground up, on a nanometer scale.
“The ability to manipulate atoms, build structures of our own, design and explore their functionality has changed people’s outlook in many ways,” says Eigler. “It has been identified as one of the starting moments of nanotech because of the access it gave us to atoms, even though no product has comes out of it.”
On the 20th anniversary of Eigler’s achievement, we look at the science, art and implications of moving individual atoms.
So, watcha’ running there on your desktop? Quad core? Octo core? Got that liquid cooler pumping away? Please. You are so behind the curve. The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (they’re what sits between the US Department of Commerce and the Weather Service) has just announced their latest big iron supercomputer. Mere mortals will quiver!
The new supercomputers, based on IBM Power 575 Systems, are four times faster than the previous system, with the ability to make 69.7 trillion calculations per second. Higher computation speed allows meteorologists to rapidly refine and update severe weather forecasts as dangerous weather develops and threatens U.S. communities. Billions of bytes of weather observations are fed into the system each day, including temperature, wind, precipitation, atmospheric pressure, and other oceanographic and satellite information taken from the ground, air, sea and space.
From what I remember of chemistry, molecules were presented on computer screens, or at the very least with dowels and balls. Thanks to this incredible discovery, however, I’m jealous of how tomorrow’s engineers will view—and control—nature’s building blocks.
Now, the picture above is pretty unremarkable, right? Black and white (trivia: molecules have no color), grainy, shot in the kind of out-of-focus manner you expect from a guy like me, who can’t seem to venture out beyond the Auto setting on his entry-level Nikon D40 DSLR. But wait a second. Doesn’t the image kind of seem, well, familiar? Like high school chem class familiar? Balls and sticks familiar?
Here’s another image; a computer generated image that’s much more at home for anyone who studied atoms and molecules in the dead and gone days of 1997:
Make sense now? That B&W structure is an actual image of a molecule and its atomic bonds. The first of its kind, in fact, and a breakthrough for the crazy IBM scientists in Zurich who spent 20 straight hours staring at the “specimen”—which in this case was a 1.4 nanometer-long pentacene molecule comprised of 22 carbon atoms and 14 hydrogen atoms.
You can actually make out each of those atoms and their bonds, and it’s thanks to this: An atomic force microscope.
Like the venerable electron microscope, but more powerful and with an eye for the third dimension, the AFM is able to make the nano world something we humans can appreciate visually. Using a silicon microscale cantilever coated in carbon dioxide (tiny, tiny needle), lasers, an “ultrahigh vacuum” and temperatures that hovered around 5 Kelvin, the AFM imaged the pentacene in nanometers. It did this while sitting a mere 0.5 nanometers above the surface and its previously invisible bonds for 20 long, unmoving hours. The length of time is noteworthy, said IBM scientist Leo Goss in statement from IBM, because any movement whatsoever would have disrupted the delicate atomic bonds and ruined the image.
And that’s the real beauty of this image. For the first time ever we can see where each of those carbon and hydrogen atoms line up, and the overall symmetrical shape they create. In 3D.
That IBM, a hardware company, was the entity to accomplish this feat should be fairly obvious, given what we know (and don’t yet know) about quantum computing. Said an IBM representative in an email to me this morning, “This pioneering achievement and the new insights gained from the experiments extend the ability of scientists to study matter with atomic resolution and open up exciting new possibilities for exploring electronic building blocks and devices at the ultimate atomic and molecular scale-devices that might be vastly smaller, faster and more energy-efficient than today’s processors and memory devices.”
In a quarkshell, that means this discovery might help future engineers manipulate atoms and their bonds, as well as create powerful, energy-sipping quantum computers for their cryptography needs, space travel or maybe even large black and yellow rooms that make our fantasies come true (or at the very least allow androids to play Sherlock Holmes).
But not so fast, Einstein. I see that tabletop subspace communicator you’ve imagined on your desktop. It’s a great idea, and while I understand your enthusiasm for such things, as Matt explained earlier this month quantum computing, entangled desktops and Star Trek holodecks are all decades away, if not more.
What this discovery does do however is advance our primitive understanding of the Way Things Are. It’s a small, nanometer-sized piece in a puzzle that doesn’t even have all the pieces on the table yet. Hell, we don’t even know where all the pieces are yet. From the looks of these images though, we will someday soon. [Images: IBM]
IBM likes its servers and supercomputers. A lot. After giving the Power6 plenty of self-congratulatory publicity, Big Blue is ready to move on to the 7th generation of Power, which is set to be announced at the Hot Chips conference this evening. With eight cores and up to four SMT4 threads running on each, the 45nm Power7 can perform 32 simultaneous tasks per chip. The designers have slapped in a whopping 32MB of eDRAM in each chip for improved latency, dual DDR3 memory controllers for a sustained 100GB per second bandwidth, and even error correcting code and memory mirroring for redundancy. Sounds like a major boon for research into the brains of mice and the history of dirty words, but we don’t expect to hear much about this proc outside the server farm.
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First thing’s first: the video beyond the break is certainly not up to our usually stellar standards. That said, the voice recording is clear enough, so you may consider it an audio presentation with the bonus of a shadowy figure making occasional hand gestures in time with what’s being said (lighting also improves as you go along). Arimasa Naitoh is the man behind the ThinkPad line, having joined the product engineering team at IBM during the 1970s and shifting with the ThinkPad brand on to Lenovo in 2005. Currently the VP for Notebook Development and the head of the Yamato Development Labs, Naitoh-san was kind enough to do a presentation in London yesterday, in which he touched on the history of the fabled laptop line and was also not shy about trumpeting the key advantages of the latest T400s flagship model. So click past the break, turn your speakers up, and get educated by one of the true founding fathers of mobile computing as we know it today.
Like the venerable electron microscope, but more powerful and with an eye for the third dimension, the AFM is able to make the nano world something we humans can appreciate visually. Using a silicon microscale cantilever coated in carbon dioxide (tiny, tiny needle), lasers, an “ultrahigh vacuum” and temperatures that hovered around 5 Kelvin, the AFM imaged the pentacene in nanometers. It did this while sitting a mere 0.5 nanometers above the surface and its previously invisible bonds for 20 long, unmoving hours. The length of time is noteworthy, said IBM scientist Leo Goss in statement from IBM, because any movement whatsoever would have disrupted the delicate atomic bonds and ruined the image.
