US develops mother of all computers

Military Supercomputer Can Process More Than 1.026 Quadrillion Calculations Per Second

John Markoff

San Francisco: An American military supercomputer, assembled from components originally designed for video game machines, has reached a longsought-after computing milestone by processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second.
The new machine is more than twice as fast as the previous fastest supercomputer, the IBM BlueGene/L, which is based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. The new $133 million supercomputer, called Roadrunner in a reference to the state bird of New Mexico, was devised and built by engineers and scientists at IBM and Los Alamos National Laboratory, based in Los Alamos, New Mexico. It will be used to solve classified military problems to ensure that the nation’s stockpile of nuclear weapons will continue to work correctly as they age. The Roadrunner will simulate the behavior of the weapons in the first fraction of a second during an explosion.
Before it is placed in a classified environment, it will also be used to explore scientific problems like climate change. The greater speed of the Roadrunner will make it possible for scientists to test global climate models with higher accuracy.
To put the performance of the machine in perspective, Thomas D’Agostino, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said that if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day.
The machine is an unusual blend of chips used in consumer products and advanced parallel computing technologies. The lessons that computer scientists learn by making it calculate even faster are seen as essential to the future of both personal and mobile consumer computing.
The high-performance computing goal, known as a petaflop — one thousand trillion calculations per second — has long been viewed as a crucial milestone by military, technical and scientific organizations in the US, as well as a growing group including Japan, China and the European Union. All view supercomputing technology as a symbol of national economic competitiveness. NYT NEWS SERVICE
Most powerful portable hurricane simulator made
Ateam of scientists and students from the University of Florida, US, has developed the world’s most powerful portable hurricane simulator, a giant machine capable of reproducing winds in excess of 193 kph and recreating rain. “We’ve harnessed 2,800 horse power, a locomotive’s worth of power, to recreate a wind field large enough to envelop part of a single family home,” Forrest Masters, the man in charge of the project, told BBC News. He and his team have strapped together eight industrial sized fans and rigged them up to four marine diesel engines so powerful that they are hooked up to a 19,000 litre water tank just to keep the engines cooled. The simulator’s wind speed and even the size and volume of raindrops are closely monitored and controlled by computer. The simulator can be used to evaluate building systems or anything else that can find its way into the path of a hurricane. ANI

THAT’S HISTORY: IBM’s BlueGene/L

Innovator’sCorner - Charging Ahead...

The cellphone dying on you is a daily soap. We speak to the sultans of sustenance who invented the mechanical mobile charger

KUNAL GUHA

It’s happened to each of us. Reaching the peak of anxiety on discovering the cellphone is drying up on battery charge. Nomophobics is what the Brit researchers call us. But, all is not lost, just yet. A tag team comprising Ankit Mehta (25), Ashish Bhat (24) and Rahul Singh (24) combine forces to form Ideas Forge, a company dedicated to keep your cellphone screen glowing at all times through their unique charger which can charge a phone just by cranking a lever.
Their prototype called the mechanical charger (for lack of a better name) looks like a pocket massager that has a lever blooming out like a one-petal flower. The mechanism requires you to connect the charger to your phone and turn the lever in circular motion. The cranking generates mechanical energy, which charges the phone.
Mehta explains, “A minute of winding
would give 30-40 minutes of stand-by time. Another unique way of charging would be the roll-on method, where you stick the lever back in and roll it on any surface, like your legs or the table. This makes it a one-hand operation, so one could easily talk on the phone using one hand, while charging it with the other.”
Mehta and his team had their share of cell phone battery woes, “We’ve actually seen our phones die during calls, leaving us handicapped from even checking the contact number to call the person back from a PCO. On looking outside, we realised this was an increasing pain-point and we were determined to solve this,” he expresses in a responsible tone.
The biggest fight for a technology innovator in India is the price-point. Regretfully adds Mehta, “Chinese products have spoilt the market. They may initially deliver but then eventually fail. So, people’s expectations from technology products have been lowered. So, when we deliver a quality product, the price expectations are low.” While issues closer to their heart would be attending to rural lighting and cooling, their commercial dream would be to develop a special charger. One that could be worn like a shirt and would facilitate all the external power needs (music player, phone etc) and even provide cooling on a hot day and light in the dark. Mehta smiles, saying, “And since you’d wear it everyday, you won’t leave home without strapping it on.”

The power rangers: (from l to r) Ankit Mehta, Ashish Bhat and Rahul Singh

Now ‘super-paper’ that’s stronger than cast iron

STOCKHOLM: Swedish researchers have created a sort of ‘superpaper’ that they claim is stronger than cast iron. Lars Berglund, a researcher from the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology, reckons that his “super” nanopaper may be used to produce extra-strong sticky tape, or even help create tough synthetic replacements for biological tissues. The researcher said that he uses cellulose – a biological material found in plants – to make his nanopaper. “Cellulose nanofibres are the main reinforcement in all plant structures, and are characterised by high strength,” he said. Berglund revealed that his new method involved breaking down wood pulp with enzymes, and then fragmenting it using a mechanical beater. “The resulting shear forces cause the cellulose to disintegrate into fibres,” he said. “As the water is drained away, the fibres join together into networks and form sheets of nanopaper.” In tests, the researchers have found that the nanopapers had a tensile strength of 214 megapascals. Cast iron – on the other hand – has a tensile strength of 130 megapascals. A research article describing the new “super” nanopaper has been published in the journal Biomacromolecules. ANI

Something’s really fishy...

Researchers at the University of Washington have created three autonomous, fish-like robots that use their fins for propulsion, and communicate wirelessly with one another underwater

MUMBAI MIRROR BUREAU

Boffins in the US have built a breed of autonomous Robofish that can work by cooperatively communicating only with each other – without human intervention.
Over the past five years, Kristi Morgansen – a University of Washington (UW) professor of aeronautics and astronautics – has built three Robofish after studying the way real fish communicate.
The robots were programmed to either all swim in one direction or all swim in different directions – basic tasks that can provide the building blocks for coordinated group movement.
“Underwater robots don’t need oxygen. The only reason they come up to the surface right now is for communication,” Morgansen said, adding that her robots do not need to come to the surface until their task is complete.
In the future, ocean-going robots, she said, could cooperatively track moving targets such as groups of whales, or explore caves underneath ice-covered waters, or even work in dangerous underwater environments.
Morganson was assisted in the study by aeronautics and astronautics students, Daniel Klein and Benjamin Triplet – and Patrick Bettale, an electrical engineering student.

LEARNING FROM REAL FISH
The Robofish, which are roughly the size of a 5-kg salmon, look a bit like fish because they use fins rather than propellers. The fins make them potentially more manoeuvrable and create lower drag than propeller-driven vehicles.
For the wireless communication aspect, Morgansen collaborated with Julia Parrish – an associate professor in the UW’s School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences – to record patterns of fish schools’ behaviour.
“In schooling and herding animals, you can get much more efficient manoeuvres and smoother behaviours than what we can do in engineering right now,” Morgansen explained. “The idea of these experiments with schools of live fish is to ask, ‘How are they doing it?’ and see if we can come up with some ideas.”
The team trained some live fish to respond to a stimulus by swimming to the feeding area. The scientists discovered that even when less than a third of the fish were trained, the whole school swam to the feeding area on cue.
“The fish that have a strong idea tend to dominate over those that don’t,” Morgansen said. “That has implications for what will happen in a group of vehicles. Can one vehicle make the rest of the group do something just based on its behaviour?”

COMMUNICATING THROUGH SONAR
Beyond finding the optimal way to coordinate movement of the robots, the researchers faced major challenges in having robots transmit information through dense water.
“When you’re underwater you run into problems with not being able to send a lot of data,” Morgansen said.
The energy required to send the information over long distances is prohibitive because the robots have limited battery power. What’s more, signals can become garbled when they reflect off the surface, or off of any obstacles, she said.
Messages were sent between the robots using low-frequency sonar pulses, or pressure waves. The results showed that only about half the information was received successfully, yet because of the way the Robofish were programmed they were still able to accomplish their tasks.
Now the researchers are using their fish’s coordination ability to do a task more similar to what they would face in the ocean. The Robofish pack’s first assignment, beginning later this year, will be to trail a remote-controlled toy shark.

Kristi Morgansen uses a remote controller to direct a Robofish. In experiments she programs basic instructions so up to three robots can navigate without human intervention INSET: The fin-propelled, autonomous Robofish designed at the University of Washington

B-school names monkey god its chairman...

Lucknow engineering and management institute names Hanuman as head; office has desk, chairs and laptop

LUCKNOW: He’s a monkey, he’s a god, and now he’s a business school chairman.
Hanuman, the popular Hindu monkey god revered for his strength and valour, has been named the official chairman of the recently opened Sardar Bhagat Singh College of Technology and Management in northern India, a school official said on Saturday.
The position comes with an incense-filled office, a desk and a laptop. Four chairs will be placed facing the empty seat reserved for the holy chairman, but all visitors must enter the office barefoot, said Vivek Kangdi, the school's vice chairman.
“It is our belief that any job that has blessings of Lord Hanuman is bound to be a success,”' said Kangdi.
All Hindus know that Hanuman can lift mountains and leap oceans, but ancient texts make no mention of his business acumen. Nevermind that, says Kangdi. “When we were looking for a chairman for our institution, we scanned many big names in the field of technology and management. Ultimately, we settled for Lord Hanuman, as none was bigger than him,” Kangdi said.
Hanuman is one of the most popular gods in the crowded pantheon of Hindu deities.
The Sardar Bhagat Singh College in Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, awards bachelor’s degrees in engineering and management. The school opened last year.
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