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IBM's Mira supercomputer does ten petaflops with ease, inches us closer to exascale-class computing
Say hello to the Blue Gene/Q, or if you're looking for something a bit less intimidating, "Mira." That's IBM's latest and greatest concoction, a ten-petaflop supercomputer capable of running programs at ten quadrillion calculations a second. Hard to say who'd win between Mira and Watson, of course, but there's absolutely no question who'd come out on top if Mira were pitted against her predecessor Intrepid (hint: Mira's 20x faster). To put this all in perspective, IBM's chiming in with this: "If every man, woman and child in the United States performed one calculation each second, it would take them almost a year to do as many calculations as Mira will do in one second." Mira's next stop is at the US Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory, where it'll be used to tackle 16 projects in particular that were drawn from a pool of proposals to gain access to her capabilities. We're told that these include a range of initiatives -- from reducing energy inefficiencies in transportation and developing advanced engine designs to spurring advances in energy technologies -- and in time, it could lead to exascale-class computers "that will be faster than petascale-class computers by a factor of a thousand." And here we are getting excited about a 5GHz Core i7.
Bacteria taught to spin microscopic gears right round, could make for better solar panels
With a name like Bacillus subtilis and a size of five microns you probably wouldn't expect much in the way of heavy lifting, but don't let first impressions fool you. This tiny organism has been taught by scientists at Argonne National Laboratory to spin little gears that weigh one million times more than the bacteria themselves -- that'd be like you lifting both an original Xbox and a PS3 at the same time! Applications are, apparently, endless, but the one that caught our eye involves photovoltaics able to "snag lots of photons from the sun." You know what that means: more juice for your Prius so you can crank that Dead or Alive CD guilt-free.
'Layered-layered' materials promise longevous Li-ions
It's been a tick since we've heard details on an emerging battery technology that promises to trounce even the best products currently available, but researchers at the Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory have reportedly developed yet another approach to boosting Li-ion capacity and stability. The technology is "based on a new material for the positive electrode made of a unique nano-crystalline, layered-composite structure," which allows an active components to provide for charge storage while residing in an inactive components which assists in keeping the risk of explosion low. Current claims are putting the capacity right around "double that of conventional Li-ion cells," and it could be used in a variety of wares from "mobiles, laptops, pacemakers and defibrillators, or even hybrid / electric vehicles." Unfortunately, there was no timetable as to when scientists expected said technology to actually be available commercially, so until then, we'll consider this yet another promise on pause.[Via I4U]
