Los Alamos National Labs’ new “Q” 30 teramips supercomputer requires a 300,000-square-foot building and 7 megawatts of electricity for cooling — ten percent of all the electricity piped into Los Alamos Labs and surrounding community.While today’s fastest machine can perform 10 trillion calculations a second, visionaries are thinking about machines 100 times faster.

That is probably eight or nine years away, Mike Vildibill, deputy director at San Diego Supercomputer… read more

Using the Internet itself as a computer, researchers have solved a mathematical problem with the unwitting assistance of machines in North America, Europe and Asia.The Notre Dame team exploited the Internet transmission control protocol (TCP). The TCP ensures accurate communication, using a “checksum” — a mathematical operation performed by sender and receiver. The two computers compare answers — if they differ, data has been corrupted in transit and they try… read more

Researchers are pursuing a cheaper way of designing and fabricating computer chips, using mirrors instead of masks.

Photolithography —- the standard chip manufacturing technique — requires expensive masks costing up to $1 million to create the patterns.

Researchers are using an array of tiny mirrors under computer control to turn individual beams on and off as the whole setup scans across the wafer.

Maskless technologies could allow… read more