A Heatsink That Could Be 30 Times More Efficient Than Today's Setups (Video)

By Dan Nosowitz

Sandia Cooler Sandia

Computers get hot. Heat is bad for computers. To whisk it away, we use a combination of heatsinks and fans to snatch heat away from the internals and blast it out of the computer's case. But Sandia has a concept that combines the two in a way that, they claim, increases heat-removing efficiency by up to 30 times.

Essentially the Sandia Cooler is just a combination heatsink/fan, which, now that we think about it, is kind of obvious. It's a heatsink that spins at 2,000 rpm--slow for a fan--but is more efficient because it actually lifts off the chip, floating in midair by about a thousandth of an inch, removing thermal resistance. The air is drawn up through the center of the spinner and flung out through the grooves, which look mostly like a curved heatsink. Because the entire thing moves, it also cuts down on dust buildup, which has a serious effect on a cooling system's efficiency. Oh, and due to its speed and the way it floats (sort of like hydroplaning), the system is much quieter than typical fans.

The creation has already been optioned by a computer company, so we should actually see it in machines relatively soon.

Source: Popsci

Researchers Build First Complete Computer Model of an Entire Organism

By Colin Lecher

Mycoplasma genitalium Science Photo Library

To conduct experiments, researchers can change a variable in an organism and watch the results unfold. But life is messy, and it's difficult to understand the underlying processes that explain the data. Digitizing the process could help, and now we're starting small: researchers have successfully made a computer model of Mycoplasma genitalium, the world's tiniest free-living bacterium.

A team at Stanford created the model, basing it on more than 900 scientific papers. M. genitalium has the smallest genome of any living organism--a mere 525 genes--but even for an organism of its size, it takes that much information to account for every interaction it will undergo in its lifespan. Researchers tallied the number of experimentally determined parameters in the model at more than 1,900; those were split up into 28 algorithms, which stepped in for biological processes.

The process might one day mean biologists could test hypotheses that wouldn't normally be possible in the real world, and it could expand into models of larger creatures. But it's a whole lot of genes between M. genitalium and most anything else. The research is reported in the journal Cell.

Source: Popsci

Hewlett-Packard Unveils Real-World Memristor, Chip of the Future

By Stuart Fox

17 Oxygen-depleted Titanium Dioxide Memristors Hewlett Packard, via Wikimedia Commons

In 1971, electrical engineering professor Leon Chua proposed a theoretical basic electronics component called a memristor. In 2008, Hewlett Packard brought the memristor out of theory and into the real world. And today, HP announced that they have finally proven that they can build devices that use memristors, instead of the transistors that enable all current computer chips. Since memristors can store and process data simultaneously, stack on top of one another in a 3-D fashion, and function at much smaller sizes than a transistor, this advance could increase the power and memory of computers to nearly unimaginable proportions within only a couple of years. "In theory we can connect thousands of layers in a very straightforward fashion," Stan Williams, and scientist at HP, told the BBC. "It could provide a way of getting a ridiculous amount of memory on a chip."

Memristors improve on transistors in three key ways. First off, they allow the same device to serve as the processor and the memory. Right now, computers need separate devices for memory (such as solid state flash memory or regular magnetic hard drives) and processing (the computer chip itself). By eliminating the communication time and energy between those different parts of hardware, a memristor system would work far faster, and with far less energy, than a traditional computer.

Second, memristors can be much smaller than transistors. Quantum mechanics limits how tiny transistors can be, a limit that current technology is rapidly approaching. Memristors would allow computer chips to continue getting smaller past that point, all without resorting to exotic tricks like graphene chips or quantum computing. Lastly, unlike transistors, which only work linearly, memristors can form three-dimensional networks. This added dimension exponentially expands the number of connections, and thus the power, of a memristor computer. In fact, the 3-D network capability of memristors is so profound that Leon Chua, the man who first theorized the existence of memristors in the 1971, believes that this technology could enable the creation of electronic brains. "We have the right stuff now to build real brains," he told the Times.

Hewlett Packard has already created a few simple devices that run on memristors as proof of concept, and they think that they can have the first working models capable of replacing some current computer parts within three years. However, with memristors enabling chip development for decades past where transistors would have hit their physical limit, the true value of this advance may not be realized for years to come.

Source: Popsci

Holey Optochip! The One-Trillion-Bits-Per-Second Chip is Here

By Clay Dillow

IBM's Holey Optochip IBM

The high data loads of the future--and even the present--require that optical communications platforms continue to get faster, leaner, and cheaper. At the Optical Fiber Communication Conference in Los Angeles today, IBM will report on a prototype optical chip it has developed that has hit a significant milestone in optical data transfer: one terabit--that’s one trillion bits--per second.

That’s like downloading 500 HD movies at once, a speed matching the bandwidth consumed by 100,000 users at today’s average high-speed Web rates. It’s important to note that this a parallel optics chip technology, not a long-range fiber optic serial communications technology, so it’s not going to instantaneously boost the speed at which data traverses the oceans. But between computers on a local network (between different servers in a data center, for instance) this technology could provide some pretty searing speeds.

The chip itself gets its name from the fact that there are 48 tiny holes bored through a standard silicon CMOS chip that connects on the back side with 24 receiver and 24 transmitter channels. These channels allow a whole lot of data to move through the chip in both directions simultaneously, allowing for these terabit-per-second transfer speeds.

What’s more, in proper IBM fashion the chip isn’t some kind of behind-the-glass prototype never destined for commercial production. The company claims it achieves these record data speeds with excellent power efficiency--that a 100-watt light bulb could power 20 of the optical modules. They are also constructed from off-the-shelf, commercially available components. But there’s no word yet on when, exactly, this manufacturer-friendly optical device might begin taking advantage of those economies of scale and deliver the next-generation of cloud computing and data center technologies.

Source: Popsci

Using Magnetic Bacteria to Construct the Biocomputer of the Future

By Clay Dillow

Magnetospirilllum magneticum University of Leeds

As computer components grow smaller and smaller it becomes more and more difficult to manufacture them by conventional means, meaning the nano-hard-drives of the future are going to come at a cost. So researchers from the University of Leeds in the UK and Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology are enlisting the help of magnetic bacteria, which they say can be harnessed to build tiny computing components similar to those found in conventional PCs, or even to construct the biological computers of the future.

The bacterium Magnetospirilllum magneticum is a naturally occurring microorganism that lives in underwater environs, using its natural magnetism to swim up and down the Earth’s magnetic field lines in search of oxygen. But when they eat iron, special proteins generate tiny crystals of the mineral magnetite within the bacteria, imbuing them with a tiny piece of one of the more magnetic natural materials on the planet.

By feeding the bacteria iron and manipulating the way they colonize, the researchers think they can essentially grow tiny magnets that could serve as components in the minuscule hard drives of the future. Whereas it’s very difficult to make very small magnets and shape them so that they can serve as memory devices, these proteins and the bacteria in which they reside can be coaxed into doing all the hard work, creating the magnetic material and churning out regularly-shaped blocks of it.

Moreover, the team has been working to produce tiny electrical wires that allow the exchange of information through cell membranes, allowing for nanoscale communication inside of a computer made up of biological cells. Because these “wires”--they’re really more like nano-scale tubes with an electrical resistance that pass through the cell wall--are covered in cell membrane, they are highly biocompatible. That of course throws open the door to all kinds of wild ideas blurring the line between the electro-mechanical and the biological, like biocompatible computers that could aid in human surgery--or even live permanently inside the human body. Somebody get Kurzweil on the line.

Source: Popsci