Entries filed under “Computing Research”

Duncan Graham-Rowe from New Scientist writes that new Phase Change Memory (PCM) materials that can hold multiple states at once could take digital information beyond just 1s and 0s. The technology, which is still in the laboratory at places like IBM’s Zurich Research Laboratory in Switzerland, would enable multiple bits to be stored in a single cell.

The idea is simple: why use a single memory cell to store two binary states when it could hold many more? The technology relies upon phase change materials (PCMs) that can hold information by switching between an amorphous state and a crystalline one. PCM memory can write and retrieve data 100 times faster than Flash memory, which is used in many consumer gadgets and computers. It is also extremely durable and can be reused at least 10 million times; Flash can cope with just 3000 uses.

PCM technology is still a ways off, according to David Wright at the University of Exeter in the UK. Differentiating between distinct states requires highly sensitive and expensive equipment, which isn’t currently practical in a chip, he said.

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In a move towards developing a complete wiring diagram of the brain, Harvard and the Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center have developed study approach that makes it possible to identify the function of individual brain cells and map the connections between them.

We’ve just begun to scratch the surface,” says Clay Reid, professor of neurobiology at the Harvard Medical School and Center for Brain Science, who led the project, ”but we’re moving toward a complete physiology and anatomy of cortical circuits.”

To create the map, Reid and his colleagues developed an advanced TMR microscope that captured high resolution photographs of extremely thing slices of a mouse brain. Hundred of Terabytes of image files were then transfered to PSC for archival and processing.

What we’ve done,” says Wetzel, referring to the paper in Nature, “is about 1/80th of the target volume for our next step, a cubic millimeter, large enough to encompass a circuit.” In preparation for the larger volume, he and Hood have begun upscaling their storage and processing capabilities to handle as much as 100 terabytes, and expect to be prepared to handle data transmission at the scale of petabytes (1000 terabytes) in two to three years.

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MIT researchers have discovered a way to increase the speed of Fourier Transform, a method for representing an irregular signal and one of the most fundamental concepts in the information sciences.

At the Association for Computing Machinery’s Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA) this week, a group of MIT researchers will present a new algorithm that, in a large range of practically important cases, improves on the fast Fourier transform. Under some circumstances, the improvement can be dramatic — a tenfold increase in speed. The new algorithm could be particularly useful for image compression, enabling, say, smartphones to wirelessly transmit large video files without draining their batteries or consuming their monthly bandwidth allotments.

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SGI CTO Eng Lim Goh has posted Ten 2012 HPC predictions in Bio-IT World. At the top of the list is the fruition of personal genomics.

Technical computing will bring truly personalized medicine: The cost of personalized genome sequencing has come down to be on par with the cost of a standard MRI, and time-to-insight for researchers is accelerating. In the next 12 months we’ll see drugs designed, produced, and administered according to a patient’s specific genomic pattern.

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