Blog: Transactional Memory: An Idea Ahead of Its Time

Transactional Memory: An Idea Ahead of Its Time
Brown University (04/09/12) Richard Lewis

Brown University researchers were studying theoretical transaction memory technologies, which attempts to seamlessly and concurrently handle shared revisions to information, about 20 years ago. Now those theories have become a reality. Intel recently announced that transactional memory will be included in its mainstream Haswell hardware architecture by next year, and IBM has adopted transactional memory in the Blue Gene/Q supercomputer. The problem that transaction memory aimed to solve is that core processors were changing in fundamental ways, says Brown professor Maurice Herlihy. Herlihy developed a system of requests and permissions in which operations are begun and logged in, but wholesale changes, or transactions, are not made before the system checks to be sure no other thread has suggested changes to the pending transaction as well. If no other changes have been requested, the transaction is consummated, but if there is another change request, the transaction is aborted and the threads start anew. Intel says its transactional memory is "hardware [that] can determine dynamically whether threads need to serialize through lock-protected critical sections, and perform serialization only when required."

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Blog: Bits of Reality

Bits of Reality
Science News (04/07/12) Vol. 181, No. 7, P. 26 Tom Siegfried

Information derived from quantum computing systems could reveal subtle insights about the intersection between mathematics and the physical world. "We hope to be able to verify that these extraordinary computational resources in quantum systems really are part of the way nature behaves," says California Institute of Technology physicist John Preskill. "We could do so by solving a problem that we think is hard classically ... with a quantum computer, where we can easily verify with a classical computer that the quantum computer got the right answer." To solve certain hard problems that standard supercomputers cannot accommodate, such as finding the prime factors of very large numbers, quantum computers must process bits of quantum information. Quantum machines would only be workable for problems that could be posed as an algorithm amenable to the way quantum weirdness can eliminate wrong answers, allowing only the right answer to prevail. In 2011, the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics' Giulio Chiribella and colleagues demonstrated how to derive quantum mechanics from a set of five axioms plus one postulate, all rooted in information theory terms. The foundation of their system is axioms such as causality, the notion that signals from the future cannot impact the present.

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Blog: Honeycombs of Magnets Could Lead to New Type of Computer Processing

Honeycombs of Magnets Could Lead to New Type of Computer Processing
Imperial College London (03/30/12) Simon Levey

Imperial College London researchers say they have developed a new material using nano-sized magnets that could lead to unique types of electronic devices with much greater processing capacity than current technologies. The researchers have shown that a honeycomb pattern of nano-sized magnets introduces competition between neighboring magnets and reduces the problems caused by these interactions by 66 percent. The researchers also found that large arrays of these nano-magnets can be used to store computable information. The research suggests that a cluster of many magnetic domains could be able to solve a complex computational problem in a single calculation. "Our philosophy is to harness the magnetic interactions, making them work in our favor," says Imperial College London researcher Will Branford. Previous studies have shown that external magnetic fields can cause the magnetic domain of each bar to ichange state, which affects the interaction between that bar and its two neighboring bars in the honeycomb. It is this pattern of magnetic states that could be computer data, according to Branford. "This is something we can take advantage of to compute complex problems because many different outcomes are possible, and we can differentiate between them electronically," he says.

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Blog: Robots to Organise Themselves Like a Swarm of Insects

Robots to Organise Themselves Like a Swarm of Insects
The Engineer (United Kingdom) (03/26/12)

A swarm of insects is the inspiration for a warehouse transport system that makes use of autonomous robotic vehicles. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics (IML) have developed autonomous Multishuttle Moves vehicles to organize themselves like insects. The team is testing 50 shuttles at a replica warehouse. When an order is received, the shuttles communicate with one another via a wireless Internet connection and the closest free vehicle takes over and completes the task. "We rely on agent-based software and use ant algorithms based on the work of [swarm robotics expert] Marco Dorigo," says IML's Thomas Albrecht. The vehicles move around using a hybrid sensor concept based on radio signals, distance and acceleration sensors, and laser sensors to calculate the shortest route to any destination and avoid collisions. Albrecht says the system is more flexible and scalable because it can be easily adapted for smaller or larger areas based on changes in demand. "In the future, transport systems should be able to perform all of these tasks autonomously, from removal from storage at the shelf to delivery to a picking station," says IML professor Michael ten Hompel.

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Blog: Researchers Send 'Wireless' Message Using Elusive Particles

Researchers Send 'Wireless' Message Using Elusive Particles
University of Rochester News (03/14/12) Peter Iglinski

Researchers at the University of Rochester and North Carolina State University (NCSU) say they have sent a message using a beam of neutrinos. "Using neutrinos, it would be possible to communicate between any two points on Earth without using satellites or cables," says NCSU professor Dan Stancil. Technology that uses neutrinos to send messages enables them to penetrate almost any material they encounter. The researchers used one of the world's most powerful particle accelerators and MINERvA, a multi-ton detector located 100 miles underground. The researchers note that significant work still needs to be done before the technology can be incorporated into a readily usable form. The message was translated into binary code, with the 1's corresponding to a group of neutrinos being fired and the 0's corresponding to no neutrinos being fired. The neutrinos were fired in large groups because they are so evasive that only about one in 10 billion neutrinos are detected. "Neutrinos have been an amazing tool to help us learn about the workings of both the nucleus and the universe, but neutrino communication has a long way to go before it will be as effective," says MINERvA's Deborah Harris.

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Blog: Streamlining Chip Design

Streamlining Chip Design
MIT News (12/08/11) Larry Hardesty

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers have developed a system that enables hardware designers to specify, in a single programming language, all of the functions they want a device to perform. The system allows chip designers to designate which functions should run in hardware and which in software, and the system will automatically produce the corresponding circuit descriptions and computer code. The system is based on BlueSpec, a chip-design language that enables designers to specify a set of rules that the chip must follow and convert those specifications into Verilog code. The MIT researchers expanded the BlueSpec instruction set so that it can describe more elaborate operations that are possible only in software. "What we're trying to give people is a language where they can describe the algorithm once and then play around with how the algorithm is partitioned," says MIT student Myron King.

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Blog: Creating Artificial Intelligence Based on the Real Thing

Creating Artificial Intelligence Based on the Real Thing
New York Times (12/05/11) Steve Lohr

Researchers from Cornell University, Columbia University, the University of Wisconsin, the University of California, Merced, and IBM are developing technology based on biological systems. The project recently received $21 million in funding from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which helped lead to the development of prototype neurosynaptic microprocessors that function more like neurons and synapses than conventional semiconductors. The prototype chip has 256 neuron-like nodes, surrounded by more than 262,000 synaptic memory modules. A computer running the prototype chip has learned how to play the video game Pong and to identify the numbers one through 10 written by a human on a digital pad. The project aims to find designs, concepts, and techniques that might be borrowed from biology to push the limits of computing. The research is "the quest to engineer the mind by reverse-engineering the brain," says IBM's Dharmendra S. Modha. DARPA wants the project to produce technology that is self-organizing, able to learn instead of just responding to programming commands, and run on very little power. "It seems that we can build a computing architecture that is quite general-purpose and could be used for a large class of applications," says Cornell professor Rajit Manohar.

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Blog: Mimicking the Brain, in Silicon

Mimicking the Brain, in Silicon
MIT News (11/15/11) Anne Trafton

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers have designed a computer chip that mimics how the brain's neurons adapt in response to new information. The chip uses about 400 transistors to simulate the activity of a single brain synapse, helping neuroscientists learn more about how the brain works, according to MIT researcher Chi-Sang Poon. The researchers designed the chip so that the transistors could emulate the activity of different ion channels. Although most chips operate in a binary system, the new chip functions in an analog fashion. "We now have a way to capture each and every ionic process that's going on in a neuron," Poon says. The new chip represents a "significant advance in the efforts to incorporate what we know about the biology of neurons and synaptic plasticity onto [complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor] chips," says University of California, Los Angeles professor Dean Buonomano. The researchers plan to use the chip to develop systems that model specific neural functions, such as the visual processing system. The chips also could be used to interface with biological systems.

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Blog: Stanford Joins BrainGate Team Developing Brain-Computer Interface to Aid People With Paralysis

Stanford Joins BrainGate Team Developing Brain-Computer Interface to Aid People With Paralysis
Stanford University (11/11/11) Tanya Lewis

Stanford University researchers have joined the BrainGate research project, which is investigating the feasibility of people with paralysis using a technology that interfaces directly with the brain to control computer cursors, robotic arms, and other assistive devices. The project is based on technology developed by researchers at Brown and Harvard universities, Massachusetts General Hospital, and the Providence Veterans Affairs Medical Center. BrainGate is a hardware/software-based system that senses electrical signals in the brain that control movement. Computer algorithms translate the signals into instructions that enable users with paralysis to control external devices. "One of the biggest contributions that Stanford can offer is our expertise in algorithms to decode what the brain is doing and turn it into action," says Stanford's Jaimie Henderson. He is working with Stanford professor Krishna Shenoy, who is focusing on understanding how the brain controls movement and translating that knowledge into neural prosthetic systems controlled by software. "The BrainGate program has been a model of innovation and teamwork as it has taken the first giant steps toward turning potentially life-changing technology into a reality," Shenoy says. The researchers recently showed that the system allowed a patient to control a computer cursor more than 1,000 days after implementation.

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Blog: RAMCloud: When Disks and Flash Memory Are Just Too Slow

RAMCloud: When Disks and Flash Memory Are Just Too Slow
HPC Wire (10/20/11) Michael Feldman

Stanford University researchers have developed RAMCloud, a scalable, high performance storage approach that can store data in dynamic random access memory and aggregate the memory resources of an entire data center. The researchers say the scalability and performance components make RAMCloud a candidate for high performance computing, especially with those applications that are data-intensive. "If RAMCloud succeeds, it will probably displace magnetic disk as the primary storage technology in data centers," according to the researchers, who are led by professor John Ousterhout. RAMCloud's two most important features are its ability to scale across thousands of servers and its extremely low latency. RAMCloud has a latency that is 1,000 times faster than disk and about five times faster than flash. In addition, the researchers predict that RAMClouds as big as 500 terabytes can be built. Although there is no set timeline to turn RAMCloud into a commercial offering, the researchers do not foresee any technological hurdles.

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Blog: Proton-Based Transistor Could Let Machines Communicate With Living Things

Proton-Based Transistor Could Let Machines Communicate With Living Things
UW News (09/20/11) Hannah Hickey

Researchers at the University of Washington have developed a transistor that uses protons, instead of electrons, to send information, which could enable electronic devices to communicate directly with living things. "We found a biomaterial that is very good at conducting protons, and allows the potential to interface with living systems," says Washington professor Marco Rolandi. A machine that was compatible with a living system could monitor body processes such as flexing muscles and transmitting brain signals. The prototype device is a field-effect transistor, a drain and source terminal for the current. "In our device, large bio-inspired molecules can move protons, and a proton current can be switched on and off, in a way that's completely analogous to an electronic current in any other field-effect transistor," Rolandi says. The device uses a modified form of the compound chitosan, originally extracted from squid pen, because it works very well at moving protons by absorbing water and forming many hydrogen bonds that the protons are able to easily move between. "So we now have a protonic parallel to electronic circuitry that we actually start to understand rather well," Rolandi says.

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Blog: Phone Losing Charge? Technology Created by UCLA Engineers Allows LCDs to Recycle Energy

Phone Losing Charge? Technology Created by UCLA Engineers Allows LCDs to Recycle Energy
University of California, Los Angeles (08/09/2011) Matthew Chin; Wileen Wong Kromhout

University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) researchers have created an energy-harvesting polarizer for liquid crystal displays (LCDs) that enables them to collect and recycle energy to power electronic devices. The photovoltaic polarizers can convert ambient light, such as sunlight and their own backlight, into electricity. It can boost the function of an LCD by simultaneously working as a polarizer, a photovoltaic device, and an ambient light photovoltaic panel. "In addition, these polarizers can also be used as regular solar cells to harvest indoor or outdoor light," says UCLA professor Yang Yang. "So next time you are on the beach, you could charge your iPhone via sunlight." Up to 75 percent of a typical device's backlight energy is lost through polarizers, but the UCLA polarizing organic photovoltaic LCD can recover much of that unused energy. "I believe this is a game-changer invention to improve the efficiency of LCD displays," Yang says. "In the near future, we would like to increase the efficiency of the polarizing organic photovoltaics, and eventually we hope to work with electronic manufacturers to integrate our technology into real products."

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Blog: Caltech Researchers Create the First Artificial Neural Network Out of DNA

Caltech Researchers Create the First Artificial Neural Network Out of DNA
California Institute of Technology (07/20/11) Marcus Woo

California Institute of Technology (CalTech) researchers have developed an artificial neural network out of DNA, creating a circuit of interacting molecules that can recall memories based on incomplete information. The network, which consists of four artificial neurons made from 112 distinct strands of DNA, plays a mind-reading game in which it identifies a mystery scientist based on answering yes or no questions, such as whether the scientist is British. The network communicates its answers using fluorescent signals and was able to correctly identify the scientist in 100 percent of the 27 trials the researchers conducted. The DNA-based neural network can take an incomplete pattern and determine what it represents. The researchers say that biochemical systems with artificial intelligence could have applications in medicine, chemistry, and biological research. They based the network on a simple model of a neuron, known as a linear threshold function. "It has been an extremely productive model for exploring how the collective behavior of many simple computational elements can lead to brain-like behaviors, such as associative recall and pattern completion," says CalTech professor Erik Winfree.

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Blog: Cracking the Code of the Mind

Cracking the Code of the Mind
American Friends of Tel Aviv University (07/12/11)

Tel Aviv University researchers have developed a type of lab-on-a-chip platform that can show how neuronal networks communicate and work together. The researchers, led by doctoral student Mark Shein, applied mathematical and engineering techniques to connect neurons with electronics in order to understand how neuronal connections communicate. The tool could be used to test new drugs, advance artificial intelligence, and develop better artificial limbs, according to the researchers. The device enables researchers to see how neural circuits operate under different conditions and explore activity patterns of many neurons simultaneously. The researchers focused on studying how several groups of neurons communicate with each other, according to Shein. The researchers cultured different sized networks of neuronal circuits and found that neural networks have a hierarchical structure in which large networks are composed of smaller sub-networks.

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Blog: Revolutionary New Paper Computer Shows Flexible Future for Smartphones and Tablets

Revolutionary New Paper Computer Shows Flexible Future for Smartphones and Tablets
Queen's University (Canada) (05/04/11)

Researchers at Queen's University, Arizona State University, and E Ink Corp. have developed the PaperPhone, an interactive paper-sized computer. "This computer looks, feels, and operates like a small sheet of interactive paper," says Roel Vertegaal, director of the Human Media Lab at Queen's University. "You interact with it by bending it into a cell phone, flipping the corner to turn pages, or writing on it with a pen." Vertegaal expects paper computers to revolutionize interactive computing within five years. The PaperPhone smartphone prototype offers all of the functions of a smartphone, but has a 9.5 cm diagonal thin film flexible E Ink display, which makes it more portable than mobile computers. The researchers say that the interactive paper-sized computers do not consume power when nobody is using them, and the devices do not feel like a sheet of glass or metal. Larger versions will be able to store and interact with documents. The researchers also developed a wristband computer based on the technology called Snaplet.

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Blog: Intel Increases Transistor Speed by Building Upward

Intel Increases Transistor Speed by Building Upward
New York Times (05/04/11) John Markoff

Intel announced that it has begun manufacturing microprocessors with a three-dimensional (3D) design known as a fin field-effect transistor (Finfet), which is based on an extremely small pillar of silicon that rises above the surface of the chip. Intel says the 3D design runs as much as 37 percent faster in low-voltage applications and it will be able to cut power consumption by as much as 50 percent. The 3D transistors could be used to develop chips as small as 10 nanometers, a size that Intel researchers believe could be achieved by 2015. Intel's Mark T. Bohr says the new technology indicates that the company is maintaining the progress in chip development called for by Moore's Law, which states that the number of transistors that can be etched on a piece of silicon doubles every two years. However, Intel's competitors say that Finfet technology is risky because although it may be faster, it also may provide less control over power consumption. ST Microelectronics is developing an alternative technology based on placing a thin insulating layer below traditional transistors, which could result in low-power applications for mobile devices.

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Blog: Memristor Processor Solves Mazes

Memristor Processor Solves Mazes
Technology Review (03/03/11)

Yuriy Pershin at the University of South Carolina and Massimiliano Di Ventra at the University of California, San Diego have developed a memristor processor that solves mazes. The researchers connect a voltage across the start and finish of the graphical puzzle and wait. "The current flows only along those memristors that connect the entrance and exit points," say Pershin and Di Ventra. The state of memristors change, enabling them to be easily identified--and a chain of memristors is a potential solution that would be much quicker than maze-solving strategies, which effectively work in series. "The maze is solved in a massively parallel way, since all memristors in the network participate simultaneously in the calculation," Pershin and Di Ventra say. They have conducted a test with a memristor simulator and believe that implementing the device in silicon will become easier over time. With the new approach, the network structure and layout take part in calculating, not just the memristors.

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Blog: Remapping Computer Circuitry to Avert Impending Bottlenecks

Remapping Computer Circuitry to Avert Impending Bottlenecks
New York Times (02/28/11) John Markoff

Hewlett-Packard (HP) researchers have proposed a fundamental redesign of the modern computer that combines memory and computing power to significantly limit energy consumption. The new computing paradigm would be based on memory chips called nanostores, which are hybrid, three-dimensional systems in which lower-level circuits are based on memristors. The nanostore chips have a multi-story design, with silicon-based computing circuits that use minimal energy. HP's Parthasarathy Ranganathan says that in about seven years nanostore chips could hold up to one trillion bits of memory and contain 128 processors. He says the key is their ability to move data using very little energy. "What's going to be the killer app 10 years from now?" Ranganathan asks. "It's fairly clear it's going to be about data; that's not rocket science. In the future every piece of storage on the planet will come with a built-in computer." Other technologies also are being developed to help computing become more energy efficient. Recently, researchers at Harvard University and Mitre Corporation developed nanoprocessor tiles made from germanium-silicon wires. IBM researchers have been studying phase-change memories based on the ability to use an electric current to switch a material from a crystalline to an amorphous state and vice versa.

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Blog: Automaton, Know Thyself: Robots Become Self-Aware

Automaton, Know Thyself: Robots Become Self-Aware
Scientific American (02/24/11) Charles Q. Choi

Cornell University's Hod Lipson is developing robots that can reflect on their own thoughts by equipping them with two controllers. One controller was rewarded for chasing dots of blue light while avoiding red dots, and the second controller modeled how the first behaved and how successful it was. This technique, known as metacognition, enabled the robot to adapt after about 10 physical experiments, as opposed to the thousands of experiments needed using traditional evolutionary robots. "This could lead to a way to identify dangerous situations, learning from them without having to physically go through them--that's something that's been missing in robotics," says University of Vermont's Josh Bongard. Lipson also is studying how robots can model what others are thinking by programming one robot to watch another randomly move toward a light. The observer developed the ability to predict the other's movements so well that it could lay a trap for it on the ground. "This research might also shed new light on the very difficult topic of our self-awareness from a new angle--how it works, why, and how it developed," Lipson says. One application for self-aware robots could be the maintenance of a bridge, with sensors constantly monitoring vibrations in the framework to develop a self-image of the bridge.

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Blog: Toward Computers That Fit on a Pen Tip: New Technologies Usher in the Millimeter-Scale Computing Era

Toward Computers That Fit on a Pen Tip: New Technologies Usher in the Millimeter-Scale Computing Era
University of Michigan News Service (02/22/11) Nicole Casal Moor

University of Michigan researchers, led by professors Dennis Sylvester, David Blaauw, and David Wentzloff, recently presented papers at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in which they discussed a prototype implantable eye pressure monitor for glaucoma patients and a compact radio that does not need to be tuned to find a signal and could be used to track pollution, monitor structural integrity, or perform surveillance. The research utilizes millimeter-scale technologies to create devices for use in ubiquitous computing environments. The glaucoma eye pressure monitor is slightly larger than one cubic millimeter and contains an ultra-low-power microprocessor, a pressure sensor, memory, a thin-film battery, a solar cell, and a wireless radio transmitter that sends data to an external reading device. "This is the first true millimeter-scale complete computing system," Sylvester says. Wentzloff and doctoral student Kuo-Ken Huang have developed a tiny radio with an on-chip antenna that can keep its own time and serve as its own reference, which enables the system to precisely communicate with other devices. "By designing a circuit to monitor the signal on the antenna and measure how close it is to the antenna's natural resonance, we can lock the transmitted signal to the antenna's resonant frequency," Wentzloff says.

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