Random Accesses

A new computer game prototype combines work and play to help solve a fundamental problem underlying many computer hardware design tasks.

The online logic puzzle is called FunSAT, and it could help integrated circuit designers select and arrange transistors and their connections on silicon microchips, among other applications.

Designing chip architecture for the best performance and smallest size is an exceedingly difficult task that's outsourced to computers these days. But computers simply flip through possible arrangements in their search. They lack the human capacities for intuition and visual pattern recognition that could yield a better or even optimal design. That's where FunSAT comes in.

Developed by University of Michigan computer science researchers Valeria Bertacco and Andrew DeOrio, FunSAT is designed to harness humans' abilities to strategize, visualize and understand complex systems.

A single-player prototype exists at http://funsat.eecs.umich.edu, implemented in Java by U-M undergraduate Erica Christensen. Bertacco and DeOrio are working on growing it to a multi-player game, which would allow more complicated problems to be solved.

Source: http://www.ns.umich.edu/htdocs/releases/story.php?id=7252

Silicon wafers covered with matching patterns of Lego-like teeth and holes could aid the development of 3D electronics, say UK researchers.

The vast majority of modern electronics are etched onto flat silicon wafers and increasing their speed normally involves squeezing more components onto the same surface area.

Now researchers are trying a different approach, by building electronics in three dimensions, typically by layering individual silicon wafers on top of one another.

Source: http://www.newscientisttech.com/article/dn10947-silicon-lego-bricks-used-to-build-3d-chips.html

Intel Corporation today described the significant technical challenges that need to be addressed if computing, from personal devices to giant data centers, is to keep up with increasing demand by consumers and businesses for Internet-based software, services and media-rich experiences.

Intel Senior Fellow and Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner outlined the importance of three major silicon breakthroughs. He started by revealing the first details of Intel’s tera-scale research prototype silicon, the world’s first programmable TeraFLOP processor. Containing 80 simple cores and operating at 3.1 GHz, the goal of this experimental chip is to test interconnect strategies for rapidly moving terabytes of data from core to core and between cores and memory.

Source: http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/20060926corp_b.htm

Sun Microsystems' "Niagara 2" processor will be able to run 64 simultaneous instruction sequences, twice that of its predecessor, when it debuts in servers during the second half of 2007.

The current UltraSparc T1 "Niagara"-based servers can run 32 threads--eight processing cores that each can run four threads. Niagara 2 still has eight cores, but each can run eight threads.

Niagara is a bet that for lower-end servers, what matters most is how well the server handles many tasks running in parallel rather than how fast it completes an individual task. In contrast, chips from IBM, Intel and Advanced Micro Devices emphasize single-thread speed.

Source: http://news.com.com/Suns+Niagara+2+doubles+down+with+twice+the+threads/2100-1006_3-6108880.html?tag=st_lh

For those of you keeping score out there, Japan is about to take back the world speed record for computing it held earlier in the decade. The MDGrape-3 at Riken (formerly known as the Institute of Physical & Chemical Research) in Yokohama was clocked at a mind-boggling one quadrillion calculations per second. In industry-speak, that's one "petaflop" of floating-point calculations per second.

After nearly four years in development and $9 million spent, the Riken machine is the first ever to accomplish the feat. It's nearly three times swifter than BlueGene/L, the official No. 1 in an industry ranking called the Top 500 Supercomputer Sites.

Source; http://www.newsfactor.com/news/Japan-Bests-IBM-in-Supercomputer-Stakes/story.xhtml?story_id=1220059R0ADY