Handheld Supercomputers in a Decade?
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Nanowires put more power in smaller packages, researcher reports.
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Smaller-capacity versions coming Q1 2008 Chip giant Intel has begun sampling a solid-state drive (SSD) designed for handheld devices. The product's known in the trade as 'a stack of Flash chips'.â¦
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What will tomorrow's mobile devices look like? asks Bill Thompson
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(InfoWorld) - What if your desktop computer could run 100 times faster than a PC and were simple enough for a high school student to program? That's not an idle question. Researchers at the University of Maryland have built a prototype of a "desktop supercomputer" that can do just that. The new computer is at least three years from reaching commercial markets, but it could have a big effect in industries that process large loads of data. They include the pharmaceutical, aerospace, military and entertainment industries, for applications such as drug modeling, computer-aided design, and digital content creation. The Explicit Multi-Threading (XMT) computer combines the decades-old philosophy of using parallel computing algorithms with the huge number of transistors in modern processors. The machine uses three field-programmable gate array chips from Xilinx to represent a network of 64 ARM processors that control dozens of threads of simultaneous computation, says Uzi Vishkin, a professor at theÂ A. James Clark School of EngineeringÂ who built the machine with his graduate students. The team is now trying to shrink the prototype, a license-plate-size board running at 75 MHz, down to a fingernail-size version running between 1GHz and 2GHz. Team members took the first step toward that goal this summer by commissioning IBM to manufacture a CMOS silicon application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) with an on-chip data interconnect network. The venture is funded with a grant from the U.S. Department of Defense, Vishkin says. A kid could do it Even if they succeed in building a smaller version of the prototype, the researchers will face the challenge of teaching programmers how to write software for a multithreaded system. Many commercial software companies are already puzzling over a similar problem today as they try to adapt to the latest dual- and quad-core processors from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. However, Vishkin says his system will be easier to program than applications for commercial multicore chips because the XMT algorithms appear to the operating system to be a single thread. "If you build it in a way that people cannot program it, it remains in the ivory tower of theory," he says. To prove his point, before the end of this year, Vishkin is planning to teach a class of high school students how to program the XMT using a version of the C programming language. He will teach college students to program the prototype in the first quarter of 2008. User wish list A desktop supercomputer would be a godsend for students and artists who rely on computers to process huge amounts of data in the creation of high-resolution digital pictures and movies, says Jon Stiles, director of campus technology at the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design in Denver. "That would absolutely revolutionize our animation department," Stiles says, adding that currently, students at the college often have to wait for nine or 10 hours while their PCs process the data in a new design. "We're constantly looking for ways to eliminate bottlenecks in production," he says. Stiles warns, however, that a parallel supercomputer would have to meet three conditions before the college could use it. It would have to offer vast data storage, be capable of running standard commercial software such as Adobe Systems' Creative Suite 3 and consume the same amount of energy as current computers. If those conditions were met, Stiles says, "my campus IT support manager would do back flips." Energy use shouldn't be a problem, says Vishkin. "Based on back-of-the-envelope calculations, we believe that each cluster we have will consume not much more power than a standard core," he says. "So we will be competitive on power draw with the same generation of multicore chips."
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Engineers from IBM, Sony and Toshiba unveiled plans Monday of a microprocessor, code-named Cell, they claim has the muscle of a supercomputer.The Intel competitor is to be used in Sony Playstations game consoles, televisons and office workstations.
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(InfoWorld) - Power consumption, parallelism, and the rapidly-expanding world of mobile communications are among the leading areas of research and development currently being investigated within some of the IT world's largest companies. Taking the stage at MIT's EmTech Conference (formerly known as the MIT Emerging Technology Conference) on Monday were top researchers from Cisco, HP, and Intel who shared their visions for the products of tomorrow by unveiling some of their leading areas of study and experimentation today. From the growing impact of mobile computing devices to the push to make IT eco-friendly, along with new efforts to take advantage of parallel data processing capabilities, researchers from the three technology bellwethers spoke of commons threads woven through all their work and in what directions they believe the results of those efforts will subsequently drive future technologies. Following a panel discussion on social networking tools that also focused heavily on the impact of mobile devices, Andrew Chien, vice president of research at Intel, said that the chip giant is also focusing heavily on the changes in IT usage and consumption that are being driven by handheld machines. However, despite the rapid development of the mobile space, Chien said Intel feels that wireless device, applications, and service providers are still falling short in terms of how "intuitive" and "seamless" their technologies currently work. "We have a healthy amount of concern about the amount of effort that these technologies require from all of us today," said Chien. "To that end, we're very excited about the idea of inference in the context of small mobile devices, about the richer senses and analysis of data that can be realized based on the body of techniques currently lumped under the umbrella of machine learning." Among the specific examples of the types of mobile applications that Intel envisions taking root in the near future are systems that offer "seamless presentation" of more useful information than those available today's handhelds, including tools that use geolocation and onboard sensors to give users data that is pertinent to their personal condition and immediate surroundings. Both Cisco and HP also count mobility among their leading areas of research, the panelists said, with Cisco looking into ways to merge "telepresence" with its recently acquired WebEx collaboration tools, and HP working on ways to more tightly link handhelds with back-end datacenter systems. Prith Banerjee, only six weeks into his new post of senior vice president of research at HP's Labs division, said that the company's work in mobility, green IT, and parallelism are converging in its larger efforts to make large data centers more efficient in general. In some cases, the work is oriented toward improving performance, such as through the use of photonic interconnects -- advanced electromagnetic technologies -- to allow datacenters to communicate more quickly. In other cases, HP Labs is looking at datacenter power consumption, using sensors built into its prototype servers to reduce costs and headaches associated with cooling the massive hardware farms. The challenges of parallel computing As for parallel computing -- roughly defined as the simultaneous execution of numerous program instructions on multiple or multi-core processors -- Banerjee said that HP is hoping to use its research efforts to help clear some of the software programming obstacles that exist on the market today. "We're very aware in our research of the challenges of making parallel software applications; we need engineers who can start writing code designed for multi-cores and to help transition software designed to run on a single processor," said Prith. If some of those roadblocks can be pushed aside, the benefits could be enormous, according to the HP researcher. "We're imaging a world where you plug in a computer and all the applications work automatically, and users don't have to worry about patches and updates," he said. "We're imagining a world where software is automatically updated and maintained so that environment for end-users will be completely automated and allow them to increase productivity. That is a very difficult problem to solve, but we're going to try to solve it." Another area of focus for all three organizations is the process of refining their internal research and development operations. Under Prith, HP will attempt to lower its overall number of research projects by folding them into larger efforts, the executive said, and Chien added that Intel is having success with "lablets," groups of researchers it sponsors at academic institutions to augment its internal R&D work. At Cisco, the massive networking company is attempting to inject an air of entrepreneurialism into areas of research that it believes can be turned into revenue-producing businesses rapidly, as evidenced by the launch of its physical security and telepresence product groups over the last several years, said Guido Jouret, CTO of the firm's Emerging Markets Technology Group. "We're trying to re-create the start-up atmosphere inside Cisco. So far, we've announced four different units, and the goal is to create one every several months," Jouret said. "We'll also continue to do small acquisitions where we can gain vital technologies or teams to help flesh out our ideas. The idea is to create an interesting mix of entrepreneurial drive." Along with security and telepresence, the company has launched a digital media group s part of the effort as well as a business devoted to replacing the static product displays found in retails stores today with "digitally-driven network displays." Jouret said that the telepresence group is working to mesh device geolocation with collaboration tools and multimedia-sharing systems. "We want to combine video with collaboration platforms for rich multimedia interaction, tools that allow companies and consumers to interact in ways that we can't even imagine yet," he said.
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The fastest type of computer. Supercomputers are very expensive and are employed for specialized applications that require immense amounts of mathematical calculations.
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A reconfigurable handheld device could foster a community of hardware hackers.
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In September, IBM announced that the Blue Gene/L prototype had sustained speeds of 36 trillion calculations per second. Last week, NASA announced that a system built by Silicon Graphics had topped that by sustaining 42 trillion calculations per second.
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Maverick, the new supercomputer from Sun Microsystems and the University of Texas at Austin, promises speedier data analysis for global weather prediction, emergency response management
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The growth of supercomputing as an enterprise IT option is one of the highlights of this week's SC2004 Supercomputing Conference, which kicks off tomorrow in Pittsburgh.
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MOFFETT FIELD, CALIFORNIA - The space race may be over, but engineers at NASA's (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's) Ames Research Center Tuesday staked their claim in another type of challenge: the never-ending contest to build the world's fastest supercomputer. At a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the NASA supercomputing facility in Moffett Field, California, the U.S. space agency unveiled its 10,240-processor Linux-based supercomputer, named Columbia, and cited benchmark numbers that show it performing faster than any other system.
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A new type of memory could soon be available to device makers.
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From the "luggable" Apple IIc and Commodore SX-64 to today's Asus Eee PC, portable computers have gotten ever smaller and sleeker. Here are some favorites from days past.
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Researchers have built a prototype of a 'desktop supercomputer' that runs 100 times faster than today's PCs.
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Powerful computer processor will be modified for mobile devices.
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A supercomputer being built by IBM for the US Department of Energy (DOE) has topped a list of the world&#39;s fastest computers. The Blue Gene/L beta-system can perform 70,720 billion calculations per second, which