Random Accesses

COME September, Singaporeans could be the first in the world to interact in real time with a programme on their TV or computer.

The Media Development Authority (MDA) announced yesterday it was awarding its first niche Internet protocol television service (IPTV) licence to VeeV Interactive.

VeeV TV, which will feature knowledge-focused content, says it is the first in the world to incorporate virtual reality into its programmes — allowing viewers to answer questions or play games and receive real-time feedback through the programme.

Source: http://www.todayonline.com/articles/241625.asp

With the dog in the MRI machine, the supercomputer prepared for surgery.
The procedure was the culmination of three years of research and development into the algorithms, computer codes, imaging technology, and cyberinfrastructure that would allow a supercomputer in Austin to perform a minimally invasive laser treatment on a canine in Houston, without the intervention of a surgeon. The scientists took a collective breath.

“We had a fifteen minute window in which a million things had to go right for this treatment to be successful,” explained David Fuentes, a post-doctoral student at The University of Texas at Austin’s Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences (ICES), and the central developer of the project. “There had to be no flaw, no silly bug, everything had to go perfectly. And if that wasn’t complicated enough, you add the complexity of a living animal. This is a pretty formidable problem.”

And yet, in April 2008, when the researchers performed the first full run of the system on a canine subject, the coordination went off without a hitch, proving the potential of supercomputers for patient-specific treatments and blazing a path to next-generation cyber-surgical methods.

Source: http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/research/users/features/dynamic.php?m_b_c=laser

In typical forward-thinking California fashion, the folks at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) are already looking beyond single petaflop systems, even before a single one has been released into the wild. LBNL researchers have started to explore what a multi-petaflop computer architecture might look like. Even ignoring the challenge of software concurrency, they point out that power and system costs will determine how such machines can be built.

To some extent, these costs are already constraining what can be built in the pre-petaflops era. To date, no one has bought a maximally configured version of any current leading edge supercomputer -- for example, an IBM Blue Gene, Cray XT, or NEC SX system -- not so much because users couldn't make good use of the computing muscle, but because the initial cost of the hardware and the power to run them would have been prohibitive.

Source: http://www.hpcwire.com/blogs/17909359.html

A leading contender to replace silicon as the basis for computing has made another step forward.

Transistors one atom thick and ten atoms wide have been made by UK researchers. They were carved from graphene, predicted by some to one day oust silicon as the basis of future computing.

For 40 years computing has been dominated by a rule of thumb named Moore's law, which predicts that the number of transistors on a chip will double roughly every two years.

Yet silicon, the material that has so far been used to keep up with Moore's law cannot form stable structures below 10 nanometres in size. And today's newest chips already have features just 45 nm across. The hunt is on for a replacement for silicon.

Source: http://technology.newscientist.com/article/dn13730-atomthick-material-runs-rings-around-silicon.html

In the era of iPods and smart phones, flash memory rules: it's small and rugged, and it keeps getting cheaper. But on the heels of flash comes faster, even more robust technology called phase-change memory, which is just starting to come out of the lab.

Now Numonyx, a joint venture that combines the flash and phase-change memory efforts of Intel and STMicroelectronics, has officially launched its operations. In doing so, the company has taken a leading spot in the burgeoning phase-change memory industry. By the end of this year, Numonyx expects to commercialize phase-change memory, and by the middle of the next decade, the company hopes to make it increase its storage capacity to render it competitive with flash as a solid-state drive replacement.

Phase-change memory, which uses a glassy material, stores information via a change in its physical state, rather than using electrical charges, as in flash. A tiny electrode heats each memory cell; the cell's state depends on the manner in which it is heated, and it subsequently represents either a 1 or a 0.

Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/Biztech/20492/