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.

Vvek's View on Artificial Intelligence

                                  After a long period of exploring, I have concluded and need verification for what I have concluded. People like me, who are interested in exploring mind freaking facts about next generation computers, can follow this way of conclusion.

                                  There is lots and lots of Institutions, Universities, Research Laboratories are racing to achieving artificial intelligence, digitallization of human brain, mind uploading, whatever the name would be.... Simply we can say, Evolution of Human by digitalization. Lets see the Summary of this Blog.

Creating New

                               Creating a new whole brain is not such an easy process like launching a satellite in its orbit or like bombarding two nuclei and fuse to form a heavier nuclei in a fusion reactor. It will be a greatest of all achievement like, John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert invented the first digital computer as a giant room sized machine on Feb. 14, 1946. As like the computer which that giant machine is shrined and made them more efficient, the core of a brain i.e. the super Processor! Up to  is being developed for a room sized racks of processors!! Simply we say Super Computers! Let us see, what are the possible ways to create such a processing device like the basic work of a Human Brain..

Neural network

                               Our brain is made of approximately 100 billion nerve cells, called neurons. Neurons have the amazing ability to gather and transmit electrochemical signals -- think of them like the gates and wires in a computer.

                               Neurons share the same characteristics and have the same makeup as other cells, but the electrochemical aspect lets them transmit signals over long distances (up to several feet or a few meters) and send messages to each other.

                        Like wise,  Neurogrid Super computer was deviced that trades the extreme precision of digital transistors for the brain's chaos of many neurons firing, with misfires 30 percent to 90 percent of the time. Yet the brain works with this messy system by relying on crowds of neurons to shout over the noise of misfires and competing signals.

                               That willingness to give up precision for chaos could lead to a new era of creative computing that simulates the unpredictable patterns of brain activity. It could also represent a far more energy-efficient era -- the Neurogrid fits in a briefcase and runs on what amounts to a few D batteries, or less than a watt. Rather than transistors, it uses capacitors that get the same voltage of neurons.

High Speed Processor

                              High speed processors are only used in Super Computers which have limited and peculiar applications such as Weather forecasting, Aerodynamic research, Probabilistic analysis, Radiation shielding modeling, Brute force code breaking, 3D nuclear test simulations as a substitute for legal conduct Nuclear Proliferation Treaty, and Molecular Dynamics Simulation.

                              Using 144 terabytes of RAM, scientists simulate a cat's cerebral cortex based on 1 billion neurons and 10 trillion synapses, IBM's Blue Gene Supercomputer Models a Cat's Entire Brain! The simulated cat brain still runs about 100 times slower than the real thing. But PhysOrg reports that a new algorithm called BlueMatter allows IBM researchers to diagram the connections among cortical and sub-cortical places within the human brain. The team then built the cat cortex simulation consisting of 1 billion brain cells and 10 trillion learning synapses, the communication connections among neurons. A separate team of Swiss researchers also used an IBM supercomputer for their Blue Brain project, where a digital rat brain's neurons began creating self-organizing neurological patterns. That research group hopes to simulate a human brain within 10 years.

Brain Simulating

                              Like before I said, Super computers consists of High speed processor is capable of process like brain atleast like a mouse's brain and nearer to a cat's brain can be used to simulate brain function and can create a model cat or atleast a mouse. But the problem is, these processors are made in huge sizes and these supercomputers are made as large number of racks and shelves! It should be first attain our brain's processing speed and it should be attain a compact size.

Program it from A to Z

                         

              If we can achieve a high speed processor, simulating the human's character is simple and it can be easily transferred into a large memory, like in Enthiran movie, the programs are named as "neural schema".

Developing the Old

                              Just imagine, there are lot of devices and machines discovered that work under our control like voice recognition devices, smart phones and other smart gadgets, artificial body parts like leg, Bionic-arm, etc.. If we can make a connection between our brain and electronic and electrical devices, why can't a Paralysed (disambiguation) person walk with a help of brain controlled Robotic-suite (suite like Iron man)??

Thought controlled Computers

                              Till now there are lot of commercial thought controlled computers are being used world wide. But, they are used only for entertaining purposes. 

Brain Controlled Devices

                        Only few people use such a technology like THIS  for some research purpose! and like THIS for some useful purpose.

Mind Uploading

                               By the help of BCI(Brain-Computer Interface), we can virtualize not only the monkeys environment, we can also virtualize and store the trace of some of our commands into a computer... Also See, BCI.

Oak Ridge's new Titan supercomputer is the fastest in the world

          The Energy Department’s new supercomputer has been named the fastest in the world. According to the Top 500 list, Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s latest flagship computer Titan leapfrogged other ultra-fast machines to the top spot, clocking in 17.59 sustained petaflops on Linpack's benchmark scale.

          The open science supercomputer has a theoretical peak performance of 20 petaflops, or a quadrillion calculations per second. The IBM-powered Sequoia dropped to second place with 16.32 petaflops.

Last year, the Department of Energy awarded Nvidia and Cray a $97 million contract to create the world’s fastest supercomputer -- and the investment has clearly paid off.

          'The nation that leads the world in high-performance computing will have an enormous competitive advantage across a broad range of sectors.'

                                                                                                                                                     - U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu

          Thanks to powerful technology first used to power video game consoles like the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3, Titan is ten times more powerful than its predecessor, Jaguar. The ultrafast computer is powered by 18,688 Nvidia Tesla K20X GPUs, the company’s fastest accelerator ever and over 560,640 AMD processors, a surprise inclusion given that 76 percent of the supercomputers on the Top 500 list use Intel.

The Department of Energy now has five systems in the top 20 including Sequoia.

          “The nation that leads the world in high-performance computing will have an enormous competitive advantage across a broad range of sectors, including national defense, science and medicine, energy production, transmission and distribution, storm weather and climate prediction, finance, commercial product development, and manufacturing,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu.  

          “Titan joins the Department’s top-ranking supercomputers in equipping our nation’s researchers with the tools needed to keep the United States on the cutting edge of innovation.”

          The dizzying computing power will be used to simulate complex models of climate change and analyzing nuclear reactions and alternative energies, and developing the next generation of materials used to manufacture U.S. goods.

Courtesy : www.foxnews.com
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2012/11/12/oak-ridge-new-titan-supercomputer-is-fastest-in-world/#ixzz2F1me4Osz

"Bionic Arm" Technology from the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago

This week, the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago introduced the first woman to be fitted with its "bionic arm" technology. Claudia Mitchell, who had her left arm amputated at the shoulder after a motorcycle accident, can now grab a drawer pull with her prosthetic hand by thinking, "grab drawer pull." That a person can successfully control multiple, complex movements of a prosthetic limb with his or her thoughts opens up a world of possibility for amputees. The setup -- both surgical and technological -- that makes this feat possible is almost as amazing as the results of the procedure.

The "bionic arm" technology is possible primarily because of two facts of amputation. First, the motor cortex in the brain (the area that controls voluntary muscle movements) is still sending out control signals even if certain voluntary muscles are no longer available for control; and second, when doctors amputate a limb, they don't remove all of the nerves that once carried signals to that limb. So if a person's arm is gone, there are working nerve stubs that end in the shoulder and simply have nowhere to send their information. If those nerve endings can be redirected to a working muscle group, then when a person thinks "grab handle with hand," and the brain sends out the corresponding signals to the nerves that should communicate with the hand, those signals end up at the working muscle group instead of at the dead end of the shoulder.

Rerouting those nerves is not a simple task. Dr. Todd Kuiken of the RIC developed the procedure, which he calls "targeted muscle reinnervation." Surgeons basically dissect the shoulder to access the nerve endings that control the movements of arm joints like the elbow, wrist and hand. Then, without damaging the nerves, they redirect the endings to a working muscle group. In the case of the RIC's "bionic arm," surgeons attach the nerve endings to a set of chest muscles. It takes several months for the nerves to grow into those muscles and become fully integrated. The end result is a redirection of control signals: The motor cortex sends out signals for the arm and hand through nerve passageways as it always did; but instead of those signals ending up at the shoulder, they end up at the chest.

To use those signals to control the bionic arm, the RIC setup places electrodes on the surface of the chest muscles. Each electrode controls one of the six motors that move the prosthetic arm's joints. When a person thinks "open hand," the brain sends the "open hand" signal to the appropriate nerve, now located in the chest. When the nerve ending receives the signal, the chest muscle it's connected to contracts. When the "open hand" chest muscle contracts, the electrode on that muscle detects the activation and tells the motor controlling the bionic hand to open. And since each nerve ending is integrated into a different piece of chest muscle, a person wearing the bionic arm can move all six motors simultaneously, resulting in a pretty natural range of motions for the prosthesis.

Courtesy - " science.howstuffworks.com "

Then why can one create a Robot that is controlled by a human brain!!!

How to weave machinery into biology

As we’re starting to test artificially grown organs, scientists are wondering how to make sure that their methods result in viable tissues. One of the first steps was to take organ growth into three dimensions, letting the cells grow on a scaffold and self-organize into the right muscles, valves, and other soft tissue. Usually these scaffolds are derived from existing organs purified of all their old cells and many are designed to break down into naturally occurring chemicals to be flushed out of the body on implantation. But how do you check what the organ can be implanted with the necessary level of precision? Why turn the scaffold into a monitoring device by letting cells grow on a sensor. This way, when the tissues grow, you can monitor the electrical buzz between the cells and track how well they’re developing and working together. But so far, this method had a pretty sever limitation. It could only be done in two dimensions, one less than we need for viable organic structures. So much potential but so problematic to implement.

Well, researchers at MIT decided to tackle this problem and came up with a new biocompatible material that could be arranged into a proper three dimensional scaffold and monitor both the structure and function of an organ. After successfully growing cardiac muscles around a mesh of this electro-sensitive substance, they were able to monitor the effects of a chemical that speeds up heart rate. Using their method, we could obtain a treasure trove of new data about how well a future artificial organ will grow and run it through a battery of tests to make sure it’s fit for clinical use to replace a damaged or failing organ. Even more interesting would be the opportunity for doctors to keep monitoring how the organ is doing and give patients advance warning should a health crisis be imminent. Imagine a future in which your aging and failing vital organs could be replaced with wired versions of themselves and report on how well your body is doing, giving all sorts of useful warnings should something new go wrong. Better yet, the mesh would simply read the behavior of the cells around it and report it back to a system which can make sense of the detected patterns so there’s not delicate, over-engineered instrument sitting inside you.

And all that brings us to another question. Could nanoparticles made from this material hitch a ride through a patient’s bloodstream to the liver, lungs, heart, kidneys, possibly into some key parts of the musculoskeletal system, maybe even the brain itself (though that would be a major challenge in and of itself), and monitor his or her health by listening to the patterns of electrical signals emitted by the organs’ cells. Could be a path to early detection and treatment of cancer strains that grow into tumors when we learn how to track the electrochemical signs of a malicious cell being formed? The possibilities posed by this technology are really quite amazing and come with great potential for new medical markets. Let’s hope there will be a lot of follow up to see if it really would be possible to make us all cyborgs with internal biocompatible sensors that will help us better diagnose what ails us as our bodies accumulate wear and tear. It sounds an awful lot like a science fiction movie, true. But in this case, the technology is very real and we have some very good ideas out there for how to turn it into science fact with the right funding and expertise behind this invention’s spin-off projects.

See: Tian, B., et al. (2012). Macroporous nanowire nanoelectronic scaffolds for synthetic tissues Nature Materials DOI: 10.1038/nmat3404

Courtesy : Weird things