IBM Introduces World's Fastest Processor: 5.2GHz Enterprise Chip

               The new zEnterprise technology is the result of an investment of more than $1.5 billion in IBM research and development in the zEnterprise line, as well as more than three years of collaboration with some of IBM's top clients around the world. If you're into details, the z196 processor is a four-core chip that contains 1.4 billion transistors on a 512-square millimeter (mm) surface. It's manufactured using IBM's 45 nanometer (nm) SOI processor technology, and it makes use of IBM's patented embedded DRAM (eDRAM) technology, which allows IBM to place dense DRAM caches, or components, on the same chips as high-speed microprocessors, resulting in improved performance.

               The core server in the zEnterprise System -- called zEnterprise 196 -- contains 96 of the world's fastest, most powerful microprocessors, capable of executing more than 50 billion instructions per second. That's roughly 17,000 times more instructions than the Model 91, the high-end of IBM's popular System/360 family, could execute in 1970.

SCIENTISTS TO REVEAL GOD PARTICLE FINDINGS

By Genevieve Gannon, AAP

An experiment accused of jeopardising the future of the planet will reach its climax this week.

Scientists will on Wednesday reveal the findings of their investigation into the piece of sub-atomic matter dubbed the God particle.

There are three possible outcomes to the 30-year search for the Higgs boson, a theoretical particle that is key to the scientific understanding of all matter.

The first outcome - they will prove its existence.

The rule book for how particles have mass operates under the assumption the Higgs boson exists.

The Higgs boson theory is a missing piece of the rule book, which would have to be rewritten or scrapped if scientists discover the particle doesn't exist.

The second outcome - they will find something previously unthought of.

The third outcome - they will be able to rule out the existence of the Higgs Boson altogether.

Melbourne University physicist Geoff Taylor, who has been involved in the Geneva project since 1989, says the significance of the experiment cannot be overstated.

"The existence or not of the Higgs is an absolutely pivotal moment," Prof Taylor said.

"For us it's an incredibly important step in understanding the universe around us."

Should the Higgs boson be discovered, scientists will be able to explore other mysterious phenomena such as dark matter.

Last week, physicists started analysing the data collected from the latest batch of experiments in Geneva.

Even they don't know what they will find.

"We know we have to discover something in this energy range," Prof Taylor said.

"The simplest thing would be the Standard Model Higgs."

The experiments having been taking place below the Geneva airport and surrounding farmland.

The Large Hadron Collider, which is housed in a 27 kilometre long tunnel, has been "smashing" particles together.

Data has then been collected from the sub-atomic fragments released by the collision.

Scientists have been analysing the data in a double-blind test, to minimise the interference of what Prof Taylor calls human foibles.

"We have to find one particular event in about a million million events," Prof Taylor says.

The experiment has previously met with opposition.

There were some who believed it could cause the end of the world because the smashing of the particles would result in the generation of mini black holes.

Prof Taylor dismissed the claims.

"As soon as you say there is the possibility of creating black holes you have people saying we are going to be swallowed up by black holes," Prof Taylor said in 2008.

"It's completely misguided."

An announcement will be made in Geneva and Melbourne at 6pm (AEST) on Wednesday.

"Whatever comes out comes out, we don't know what that will be yet," Prof Taylor said.

Windows 8 Release Preview(Evaluation copy)

Its look like Microsoft also begins to distribute free apps and let us to develop a app like Linux distributions..... Microsoft clearly plans to overtake both Android and Linux by distributing free apps like open source!!!

The Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk)

The Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing Internet marketplace that enables computer programmers (known as Requesters) to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks that computers are currently unable to do. It is one of the suites of Amazon Web Services. The Requesters are able to post tasks known as HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks), such as choosing the best among several photographs of a store-front, writing product descriptions, or identifying performers on music CDs. Workers (called Providers in Mechanical Turk's Terms of Service) can then browse among existing tasks and complete them for a monetary payment set by the Requester. To place HITs, the requesting programs use an open Application Programming Interface, or the more limited MTurk Requester site. Requestors are restricted to US-based entities.

Requesters can ask that Workers fulfill Qualifications before engaging a task, and they can set up a test in order to verify the Qualification. They can also accept or reject the result sent by the Worker, which reflects on the Worker's reputation. Currently, Workers can have an address anywhere in the world. Payments for completing tasks can be redeemed on Amazon.com via gift certificate or be later transferred to a Worker's U.S. bank account. Requesters, which are typically businesses, pay 10 percent of the price of successfully completed HITs to Amazon.

CERN Officials May Have Witnessed ‘God Particle’

The Higgs boson is a hypothetical elementary particle predicted by the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics. It belongs to a class of particles known as bosons, characterized by an integer value of their spin quantum number. The Higgs field is a quantum field with a non-zero value that fills all of space, and explains why fundamental particles such as quarks and electrons have mass. The Higgs boson is an excitation of the Higgs field above its ground state.

One possible signature of a Higgs boson from a simulated proton-proton collision. It decays almost immediately into two jets of hadrons and two electrons, visible as lines.

The existence of the Higgs boson is predicted by the Standard Model to explain how spontaneous breaking of electroweak symmetry (the Higgs mechanism) takes place in nature, which in turn explains why other elementary particles have mass. Its discovery would further validate the Standard Model as essentially correct, as it is the only elementary particle predicted by the Standard Model that has not yet been observed in particle physics experiments. The Standard Model completely fixes the properties of the Higgs boson, except for its mass. It is expected to have no spin and no electric or color charge, and it interacts with other particles through weak interaction and Yukawa interactions. Alternative sources of the Higgs mechanism that do not need the Higgs boson are also possible and would be considered if the existence of the Higgs boson were ruled out. They are known as Higgsless models.

Experiments to determine whether the Higgs boson exists are currently being performed using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, and were performed at Fermilab's Tevatron until its closure in late 2011. Mathematical consistency of the Standard Model requires that any mechanism capable of generating the masses of elementary particles become visible at energies above 1.4 TeV; therefore, the LHC (designed to collide two 7-TeV proton beams) is expected to be able to answer the question of whether or not the Higgs boson actually exists. In December 2011, Fabiola Gianotti and Guido Tonelli, spokespersons of the two main experiments at the LHC (ATLAS and CMS) both reported independently that their data hints at a possibility the Higgs may exist with a mass around 125 GeV/c2 (about 133 proton masses, on the order of 10−25 kg). They also reported that the original range under investigation has been narrowed down considerably and that a mass outside approximately 115–130 GeV/c2 is almost ruled out. No conclusive answer yet exists, although it is expected that the LHC will provide sufficient data by the end of 2012 for a definite answer.

"Discovery or exclusion of the Higgs particle, as predicted by the Standard Model, is getting ever closer," CERN Director for Research and Scientific Computing, Sergio Bertolucci, said in a statement. "Both occurrences will be great news for physics, the former allowing us to start the detailed study of the Higgs particle, the latter being the first proof of the incompleteness of the Standard Model, requiring new phenomena to be happening within the reach of the LHC."

"We’re taking our first steps in this new physics landscape," added CMS experiment spokesman Guido Tonelli, "and it is great to see how fast we are producing new results. I am confident that soon there will be only a few regions left where the Higgs boson, as postulated by the Standard Model, might still be hiding."

Source: redOrbit (http://s.tt/160nr)

Prototype Nano Assembler

This is not what you'd normally expect to see in a press release from a U.S. government scientist:

The first real steps towards building a microscopic device that can construct nano machines have been taken by US researchers. Writing in [a] peer-reviewed publication, researchers describe an early prototype for a nanoassembler.

In his 1986 book, The Engines of Creation, K. Eric Drexler set down the long-term aim of nanotechnology -- to create an assembler, a microscopic device, a robot, that could construct yet smaller devices from individual atoms and molecules.

For the last two decades, those researchers who recognized the potential have taken diminutive steps towards such a nanoassembler. Those taking the top-down approach have seen the manipulative power of the atomic force microscope (AFM), a machine that can observe and handle single atoms, as one solution. Those taking the bottom-up approach are using chemistry to build molecular machinery.

However, neither the top-down nor the bottom-up approach is yet to fulfill Drexler's prophecy of functional nanobots that can construct other machines on a scale of just a few billionths of a meter. . .

Yet the rewards could be enormous with the ultimate potential of creating a technology that can construct almost any material from atoms and molecules from super-strong but incredibly lightweight construction materials to a molecular computer or even nanobots that can make other nanobots to solve global problems, such as food, water, and energy shortages.

Jason Gorman, contact person on the announcement, is with the Intelligent Systems Division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Here's more from the release:

Gorman and his colleagues at NIST have taken a novel approach to building a nanoassembler and reveal details in a forthcoming issue of the International Journal of Nanomanufacturing. "Our demonstration is still a work in progress," says Gorman, "you might describe it as a 'proto-prototype' for a nanoassembler."

The NIST system consists of four Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS) devices positioned around a centrally located port on a chip into which the starting materials can be placed Each nanomanipulator is composed of positioning mechanism with an attached nanoprobe. By simultaneously controlling the position of each of these nanoprobes, the team can use them to cooperatively assemble a complex structure on a very small scale. "If successful, this project will result in an on-chip nanomanufacturing system that would be the first of its kind," says Gorman. . .

Importantly, once the team has optimized their design they anticipate that nanoassembly systems could be made for around $400 per chip at present costs. This is thousands of times cheaper than macro-scale systems such as the AFM.

Gorman points out that it should be possible to have multiple nanoassemblers working simultaneously to manufacture next generation nanoelectronics. At the moment, his team is interested in developing the platform for scientists and engineers to make cutting edge discoveries in nanotechnology. "Very few effective tools exist for manipulation and assembly at the nano-scale, thereby limiting the growth of this critical field," he says.

Assuming this concept can be put into practice, as Gorman and his team expect, it will represent a significant step forward in enabling technologies for molecular manufacturing. It's not all the way there, of course. In fact, several more steps will be required, which may take at least another five to ten years.

But this is an important advance, especially since it comes from within the U.S. scientific community, which up until now has been largely dismissive of molecular manufacturing theory.