[tt] advanced nanotechnology - 3 new articles
Eugen Leitl
<eugen at leitl.org> on
Wed Jun 27 13:57:34 UTC 2007
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Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2007 09:56:16 -0400
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Subject: advanced nanotechnology - 3 new articles
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"[2]advanced nanotechnology" - 3 new articles
1. [3]IBM, SUN accouncing new petaflop supercomputers
2. [4]100 KW solid state lasers being assembled
3. [5]Practical route to room temperature superconductors
4. [6]More Recent Articles
[7]IBM, SUN accouncing new petaflop supercomputers
[8]IBM, Sun announcing petaflop class supercomputers
IBM and Sun Microsystems are providing details of their separate
supercomputer offerings at the 2007 International Supercomputer
Conference in Dresden.
[9]Sun microsystems petaflop machine will be called "the
Constellation" From development information in 2005, the new Sun
architecture system uses Sun Fire x86, 64-bit (now called x64
within the industry) servers with 10,480 AMD Opteron processor
cores, totaling more than 50 trillion floating point operations per
second (teraFLOPS). The computer also includes Sun and NEC storage
technologies and NEC's integration expertise as well as
ClearSpeed's Advance accelerator boards.
Sun's Constellation promises to deliver nearly 2 petaflops of
performance.
It features 82 SunFire blade servers, two Sun Magnum ultra-dense
switches, an Infiniband host interface (with 288 ports),
next-generation Mellanox HCA (high-contrast addressing) and a Sun
Fire X4500 storage cluster with 480TB per rack.
The core switch supports up to 3,456 nodes, and each custom rack
supports 48 server modules, chief architect Andy Bechtolsheim said.
The Constellation also features Solaris, Linux, OpenMPI, Open
InfiniBand interfaces and management, x64 Computing Architecture,
and InfiniBand DDR interconnect. Its compute speed is estimated at
1.7 petaflops, and it will store up to 10 petabytes of data,
Bechtolsheim said.
[10]The heart of the Sun constellation is the switch
Code-named Magnum, the switch comes with 3,456 ports, a
larger-than-normal number that frees up data pathways inside these
powerful computers. "We are looking at a factor-of-three
improvement over the current best system at an equal number of
nodes," said Andy Bechtolsheim, chief architect and senior vice
president of the systems group at Sun.
The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of
Texas is currently preparing a Constellation system. If TACC can
get enough Barcelona chips from Advanced Microsystems by October
15, its system will land near the top of the next Top 500
Supercomputers list, Sun says. The TACC system will provide a peak
performance of around 500 teraflops, or 500 trillion operations a
second.
The Sun system will cost about $59 million, while the IBM
supercomputer runs between $1.3 million and $1.7 million for each
server in the system cluster.
IBM will introduce the Blue Gene/P system--that will eventually
replace the L system, said Herb Shultz, a product marketing manager
for IBM's Deep Computing division.
The Blue Gene/P system looks to offer three times the computing
power of IBM's previous Blue Gene supercomputer. The system now
offers a scale ranging from 1 petaflop to 3.5 petaflops when fully
configured with 256 server racks.
IBM will use its own Power Architecture with the Blue Gene/P
system. Each Blue Gene chip will use four PowerPC 450 processing
cores. The chip offers top clock speed of 850MHz and can perform
13.6 billion calculations per second. The current crop of Blue Gene
chips are dual-core chips with a clock speed of 700MHz.
The older and new Blue Gene chips use the same thermal envelope,
and the newer supercomputer offers greater performance while using
about 20 percent more power.
The new Blue Gene chips also offer more memory and SMP (symmetric
multiprocessing), which is designed to support multithreaded
software applications. The new supercomputer also offers a new
interface, which will make writing applications for the system
easier for developers. (The supercomputer's operating system is
based on Linux.)
A typical Blue Gene/P system board will hold 32 microprocessors,
and the average 6-foot rack server will hold 32 of these boards,
which gives the system more than 4,000 processing cores per server
rack.
A 72-rack Blue Gene/P system with 294,912 processing cores will
achieve the 1 petaflop of computing performance, Shultz said. A
216-rack cluster offers 3 petaflops of performance.
[11]Cnet has some more info on the IBM Blue Gene/p
[12]The most expensive part of a supercomputer is the memory
FURTHER READING:
[13]Nvidia's deskside supercomputer for teraflops of power for a few
thousand dollars Nvidia will be scaling up this offering and
significantly improving it for later this year and next year with
double precision floating point.
[14]More on the Nvidia teraflop offerings and potential impact
[15]What it would take for zettaflop computing
[16]China is building three petaflop computers by 2010
[17]Japan is building a 10 petaflop machine by 2011
[18]Other petaflop projects including the completed MDGrape3
[19]Flash memory improving faster than Moore's law will accelerate
larger database searches
[20]Other things going faster than Moore's Law
[21]which includes gene sequencing costs
[22]system integration
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[26]100 KW solid state lasers being assembled
[27]Northrop Grumman Corporation (NYSE:NOC) has entered the
integration and test phase for the Joint High Power Solid State Laser
(JHPSSL) Phase 3 program after exceeding all demonstration
requirements for the first gain module, or building block, that forms
the core of its 100 kW solid-state laser system. This is four months
after the 67 kilowatt solid state laser was announced.
Manufacturing has begun in the new facility, which was designed
specifically to produce high-power gain modules beginning with the
JHPSSL Phase 3 program. Altogether, there will be 32 gain modules
in the company's 100 kW JHPSSL Phase 3 demonstrator.
"This means that Northrop Grumman has designed a 100 kW solid-state
laser system that can be efficiently manufactured," said Alexis
Livanos, corporate vice president and president of Northrop
Grumman's Space Technology sector. "We are gratified by the great
confidence shown in our design and analysis for this powerful laser
system."
The first gain module demonstrated under the program produced a
power level of more than 3.9 kW, operated for 500 seconds at 20.6
percent efficiency, according to Mike McVey, vice president of
Directed Energy Systems for Northrop Grumman's Space Technology
sector.
"Our design for the JHPSSL Phase 3 laser includes design features
needed for future systems," noted McVey. "We are making major
improvements in size, weight and power in the Phase 3 laser
compared with the system we demonstrated in the last phase."
Note: the 20.6% efficiency would mean that you need to supply 5 times
the power to the lasers to get a particular amount of laser energy.
I have had several articles on using arrays of solid state lasers to
launch vehicles into space and to accelerate vehicles that are already
in space.
[28]Laser arrays for space launch can be like the modular components
of the internet infrastructure. Highly utilized tiered system that can
be built modularly and incrementally.
[29]Laser and magnetic launch
[30]Putting the breaks on laser mirrors and all photonic propulsion
[31]Using 67KW solid state lasers to send a vehicle to Mars in 10 days
FURTHER READING:
[32]Slope efficiency
Definition: differential power efficiency of a laser
An important property of an optically pumped laser is its slope
efficiency (or differential efficiency), defined as the slope of
the curve obtained by plotting the laser output versus the pump
power. Usually, this curve is close to linear, so that the
specification of the slope efficiency as a single number makes
sense. However, quite nonlinear curves can occur under various
circumstances, e.g. as a consequence of three-level characteristics
of the gain medium or thermal effects.
[33]Ceramic Laser Boasts 82 Percent Slope Efficiency Diode-pumped
Yb:Y2O3 laser believed to be most efficient ever.
[34]Lasers with Nonlinear Input-Output Characteristics
The slope efficiency of a laser is an often used quantity, but
there are actually plenty of cases where such a specification makes
no sense - simply because there is no linear relation between pump
power and output power
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[38]Practical route to room temperature superconductors
[39]Here is a pdf of a paper "Route to Room-Temperature
Superconductivity from a Practical Point of View" by A. Mourachkine of
the University of Cambridge
This chapter presents analysis of experimental data which allow one
to draw a conclusion about components and the structure of a
potential room-temperature superconductor. The two essential
components of a roomtemperature superconductor are large organic
molecules (polymers, tissues) and atoms/molecules which are
magnetic in the intercalated state. This conclusion is fully based
on experimental facts known today, and does not require any
assumptions about the mechanism of room-temperature
superconductivity. This, however, does not mean that to synthesize
a room-temperature superconductor is an easy task.
From a technical point of view, superconductors only become useful
when they are operated well below their critical
temperature--one-half to two-third of that temperature provides a
rule of thumb. Therefore, for an engineer, a room-temperature
superconductor would be a compound whose resistance disappears
somewhere above 450 K. Such a material could actually be used at
room temperature for large-scale applications. At the same time, Tc
?1 350 K can already be useful for small-scale (low-power)
applications. Consequently, unless specified, the expression "a
room-temperature superconductor" will further be used to imply a
superconductor having a critical temperature Tc >= 350 K.
The benefits [of room temperature superconductors] would range from
minor improvements in existing technology to revolutionary
upheavals. All devices made from the room-temperature
superconductor will be reasonably cheap since its use would not
involve cooling cost. Energy savings from many sources would add up
to a reduced dependence on conventional power plants. Compact
superconducting cables would replace unsightly power lines and
revolutionize the electrical power industry. A world with
room-temperature superconductivity would unquestionably be a
cleaner world and a quieter world. Compact superconducting motors
would replace many noisy, polluting engines. Advance transportation
systems would lessen our demands on the automobile. Superconducting
magnetic energy storage would become commonplace. Computers would
be based on compact Josephson junctions. Thanks to the
high-frequency, high-sensitivity operation of superconductive
electronics, mobile phones would be so compact that could be made
in the form of an earring. SQUID (Superconducting QUantum
Interference Device) sensors would become ubiquitous in many areas
of technology and medicine. Room-temperature superconductivity
would undoubtedly trigger a revolution of scientific imagination.
The effects of room-temperature superconductivity would be felt
throughout society, including children who might well grow up
playing with superconducting toys.
According to the first principle of superconductivity,
superconductivity requires electron pairing. Indeed, the electron
pairing is the keystone of superconductivity.
Therefore, in quest of compounds that superconduct above room
temperature, one should first look at materials which tolerate the
presence of Cooper pairs at high temperatures. Fortunately, it is
known already for some time that the Cooper pairs exist in some
organic compounds at and above room temperature.
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