IBM to recycle silicon for solar
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IBM announced Tuesday that it has created a process allowing its manufacturing facilities to repurpose otherwise scrap semiconductor wafers.
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SAN JOSE, Calif. -- IBM has devised a way to triple the amount of memory stored on computer chips and double the performance of data-hungry processors by replacing a problematic type of memory with a variety that uses much less space on the slice of silicon.
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Sun Microsystems on Tuesday took what it says are early steps toward a future in which computing power is sold as a commodity like electricity.
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Blog: IBM's Venture Capital Group is placing its own bets in clean tech in energy efficiency and water conservation.
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(InfoWorld) - IBM has demonstrated how to perform certain computer functions on single atoms and molecules, a discovery that could someday lead to processors the size of a speck of dust, the company said Thursday. Researchers at IBM's Almaden Research Center in California developed a technique for measuring magnetic anisotropy, a property of the magnetic field that gives it the ability to maintain a particular direction. Being able to measure magnetic anisotropy at the atomic level is a crucial step toward the magnet representing the ones or the zeroes used to store data in binary computer language. In a second report, researchers at IBM's lab in Zurich, Switzerland, said they had used an individual molecule as an electric switch that could potentially replace the transistors used in modern chips. The company published both research reports in Friday's edition of the journal Science. The new technologies are at least 10 years from being used for components in commercial products, but the discoveries will allow scientists to take a large step forward in their quest to replace silicon, said IBM spokesman Matthew McMahon. To build faster, smaller chips, IBM and other chip vendors like Intel and AMD have shrunk the dimensions of chip features from 90 nanometers to 65nm in the current generation of chips and plan to continue to 45nm and 32nm in coming years. The problem is that wires built from silicon tend to leak more electricity at each step on that scale and will eventually reach a limit where they are no longer useful. "Across all our areas of nanotechnology research, we're trying to determine the new kinds of materials we can use in computing when silicon reaches its fundamental limits. The ultimate goal is molecular-level computers, but the interim products will probably be hybrids with current technology, using things like carbon nanotubes," McMahon said. IBM defines nanotechnology as work done at a scale of 100nm or smaller. At that scale, scientists must use a tool called the STM (scanning tunneling microscope) to photograph and manipulate individual atoms as they did in their latest research. Their next challenge is to find a way to make these laboratory demonstrations work at room temperature, he said. Having measured the magnetic anisotropy of a single atom, "their next step is finding atoms that can do it at stable temperatures that are suitable for storage devices. If they can find that, it's still a decade out from commercialization," he said. The Zurich researchers also developed a technique for using a molecule containing two hydrogen atoms as a switch, either on its own or with an adjacent molecule. They are now looking to apply the method to many other molecules, enabling the system to work as a collection of logic gates, the building blocks of microprocessors. Even if the teams reach those goals, they must find a way to manufacture the systems on a large scale, instead of moving single atoms with the STM. One possibility is to use the process of self-assembly, where atoms under certain conditions will naturally form the desired shapes. In May, IBM said it had used that approach to insulate the wires on a chip by creating trillions of tiny, vacuum-filled holes around each one.
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IBM has devised a way to triple the amount of memory stored on computer chips and double the performance of data-hungry processors by replacing a problematic type of memory with a variety that uses much less space on the slice of silicon.
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Cache heavy QS20 blinking in sunlight IBM has finally, finally, started shipping computers based on the Cell architectured it co-developed with IBM, Sony and Toshiba.â¦
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Computer users are being asked to donate their unused processor power to help solve social and environmental research problems. The IBM-backed project, called World Community Grid, aims to put the untapped
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IBM Corp. researchers are touting one of the tiniest pieces of art ever made &#151; an image of the sun made from 20,000 microscopic particles of gold. The precision required is a breakthrough that heralds ultra-miniature sensors, lenses and wires inside nanoscale circuits of the future.
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IBM IBM.N will build a   next-generation supercomputer for the U.S. Energy Department   with the potential to achieve a sustained speed of 1,000   trillion calculations per second, or one petaflop, the   department said on Wednesday.
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Scientists create a tiny image of the Sun using a technique which could be used to make future silicon chips.
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IBM's (NYSE: IBM) Blue Gene/L, which is being installed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, recaptured the supercomputer speed record that Silicon Graphics' (NYSE: SGI) Columbia system at NASA held for barely a week.
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Companies will use strained silicon to boost transistor speed.
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IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) and Advanced Micro Devices (NYSE: AMD) said Monday that they have developed a strained silicon transistor technology aimed at
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A breakthrough in the way scientists make crystals could lead to a replacement for silicon in chips for devices.
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IBM is filling in the center of its Power 5-based eServer i5 lineup on Tuesday, unwrapping a four-way system aimed at midsize companies looking to consolidate a variety of business applications.
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(InfoWorld) - Sun Microsystems is aiming to wrest the world supercomputing crown from IBM's Blue Gene, courtesy of a $59 million contract from the University of Texas for its Constellation design. The design provides 21 million flops (floating-point operations per second), potentially reaching 2 petaflops (Pflops). IBM already has a 3-Pflop version of its Blue Gene supercomputer, but Sun could potentially hit the No. 2 spot. Sun's Constellation will be installed at the Texas Advanced Computing Center along with other supercomputers and is a Linux cluster system, to be known as Ranger. It will have 3,288 nodes, starting out with 26,304 processing cores, using AMD's forthcoming Barcelona 4-core Opteron design, mounted on Sun blades. Ultimately, there will be 1,302 Opterons providing 52,608 cores. The initial memory will be 52.6TB with a final RAM capacity of 105TB. This will be backed up with 1.73PB of disk storage. The system components are connected by InfiniBand with a 3,456-port central switch designed by Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolstein. Its total bandwidth is 110TB per second, and it connects 1,152 cables with 12 connections per wire. The benefit of a big switch is that interswitch cables -- needed if smaller switches were used -- can be dispensed with, saving a lot of money as it's cheaper to build one big switch than link several smaller switches. Six times fewer cables are needed, in fact. Sun also said that the processors get a standard latency for data access this way. It will need 3 megawatts of power to run, and a standard rack holds 768 cores. Sun estimates that Constellation could scale to a 2-Pflop system with 1 exabyte of disk capacity. It isn't enough to keep IBM at bay, though. IBM has announced Blue Gene/P, the second generation of the world's most powerful supercomputer. Also a Linux cluster, it nearly triples the performance of its predecessor, Blue Gene/L, while remaining, according to IBM, the most energy-efficient and space-saving computing package ever built. It is designed to run continuously at speeds faster than 1 Pflop and could be configured to reach 3 Pflops. IBM suggests that a home user would need a 1.5-mile-high pile of laptops to have the equivalent of 1 Pflop of computing power. Dave Turek, IBM's deep computing vice president, said, "We see commercial interest in Blue Gene developing now in energy and finance, for example. This is on course with an adoption cycle -- from government labs to leading enterprises -- that we've seen before in the high-performance computing market." IBM said Blue Gene/P is a green supercomputer, being at least seven times more energy efficient than any other supercomputer. Its design uses many small low-power chips, each connected through five specialized networks inside the system. Blue Gene/L uses dual-core 700MHz chips. Blue Gene/P has four 850MHz PowerPC 450 processors integrated on a single chip. Each chip is capable of 13.6 billion operations per second. A 2-by-2-foot board containing 32 of these chips churns out 435 billion operations every second, making it more powerful than a typical, 40-node cluster based on two-core commodity processors. Thirty-two of the compact boards comprise the 6-foot-high racks, meaning 4,096 cores per rack -- far denser than Sun's core count per rack. The 1-Pflop Blue Gene/P configuration is a 294,912-processor, 72-rack system harnessed to a high-speed, optical -- not InfiniBand -- network. A new SMP mode supports multithreaded applications. The U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, Ill., will deploy the first Blue Gene/P in the United States beginning later this year. In Germany, the Max Planck Society and Forschungszentrum Julich also plan to begin installing Blue Gene/P systems in late 2007. Additional Blue Gene/P rollouts are being planned by Stony Brook University and Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y., and the Science and Technology Facilities Council, Daresbury Laboratory in Cheshire, England.