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In the past five years, Spanish companies and institutions have sharply increased their focus on biotechnology, and the results — in new companies, new products, and new research centers—represent an important contribution to the growing international field. This is the sixth in an eight-part series highlighting new technologies in Spain and is produced by Technology Review, Inc.’s custom-publishing division in partnership with the Trade Commission of Spain.

In conversations about biotechnology in Spain, one word appears repeatedly: revolution. According to many in the field, huge changes are afoot in Spanish science today. Though the country has historically focused on producing quality scientific research and papers, the past five years have seen a dramatic increase in the launch of companies, the development of new research centers, and the transfer of top-quality technology into economic development.
Both the national and local governments have embraced the current European focus on developing a knowledge-based economy, one that creates companies—and income—from the ideas of its citizens. National and local governments have increased funding for research, created new research centers, and provided mechanisms to advance technology transfer. Though this focus is relatively new in Spain, the strong scientific environment has provided a rich medium for the rapid growth of biotechnology, which has seen intensive investment and development in the past five years. According to Genoma España, a government-funded organization that promotes genomic research and practical applications, half of all scientific research in Spain focuses on biomedicine.

Starting Up
The seeds of the current revolution were planted at the National Center for Biotechnology (CNB in Spanish), located on the outskirts of Madrid. For the past 15 years, CNB has housed and promoted top-quality science while simultaneously focusing on technology transfer and spinoffs. Eleven companies so far have sprung from the CNB labs. At 720 researchers, CNB is the largest center of the National Research Council—and the first to focus so intensively on technology transfer. “For instance, we were the first center to have our own technology-transfer office,” says CNB’s director, José Ramon Naranjo.
The departments cover a wide variety of topics: researching viruses and developing vaccination protocols; analyzing microorganisms for their potential in bioremediation; studying pathogens and their mechanisms of disease production in order to develop new antimicrobial compounds; studying species of wine grapes to understand how the plants produce defenses to cope with viral attacks or lack of nutrients.
One group at the center recently developed a method for studying the genome of a pathogenic salmonella strain (previously only a nonpathogenic strain had been studied) in order to better understand its virulence. Another company on-site is working on a land-mine detection system based on the ability of certain bacteria to eat explosive compounds. These bacteria have been manipulated to glow at night if they are “happy,” as Naranjo explains—“and they’re happy when they’re eating this compound.”

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http://www.technologyreview.com/micr...spain/biotech/

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Physicists at MIT and the University of Rochester have devised a new way to take "snapshots" of the high-energy, high-temperature reactions seen as key to achieving the long-held dream of controlled nuclear fusion.
The work, which is reported in the Feb. 28 issue of Science, could one day help scientists harness nuclear fusion as an energy source. It could also shed light on basic questions about the physics of stars.
Nuclear fusion--the process by which atomic particles clump together to form a heavier nucleus--releases an enormous amount of energy (roughly one million times that of a chemical reaction). When nuclear fusion occurs in an uncontrolled chain reaction, it can result in a thermonuclear blast--such as the one generated by hydrogen bombs.
Achieving controlled nuclear fusion, which could be a safe and reliable source of nearly limitless energy, is one of the "holy grails" of high-energy-density physics, according to Richard Petrasso, senior research scientist at MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center and an author of the Science paper.
For decades, scientists at MIT and elsewhere have been working toward that goal by setting off miniature implosions that recreate the high temperatures and densities found in stars.
One way physicists create the implosions is by bombarding tiny pellets of hydrogen fuel with lasers. Inside the pellet, the compressed gas reaches about 100 million degrees, or about seven times hotter than the center of the sun. Under certain conditions, the gas's density can reach 1,000 grams per cubic centimeter (50 times the density of gold).
"It really creates conditions you can only find in the interior of stars," Petrasso said.
Until now, physicists have largely been able to study the implosions only by measuring the particles released by the imploding gas, such as protons, X-rays, neutrons and photons. Alternatively, they have also studied implosions with X-rays, creating images of the compressed pellets.
The new detection method allows scientists, for the first time, to take a snapshot of the electric and magnetic fields generated by the implosion.
The process requires two implosions: one to be studied, and a second that serves to illuminate the first implosion. The first implosion lasts about three nanoseconds (billionths of a second) and the second one can be timed to go off anytime within those three nanoseconds.
The second implosion generates a stream of protons that all have the same energy level, 15 million electron volts. Because protons are charged, their paths are influenced by the fields surrounding the first implosion. These protons can be recorded, just like photons, to create an image of the fields' effects. Photons, however, are unaffected by such fields and thus cannot detect their presence.
"It's a way of capturing images with protons instead of photons," Petrasso said.
Such images can help scientists figure out whether the implosions are close to symmetrical.
To achieve nuclear fusion, the implosion must occur with near-perfect symmetry. Such an event, also known as ignition, has never been demonstrated experimentally.
If ignition occurs, between 10 and 150 million joules of fusion energy would be released. (150 million joules is about the amount of energy in a gallon of gasoline, released from something the size of a small pin head.)
Most of this work was conducted using a laser system at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics at the University of Rochester. The laser system, called Omega, is about the size of a football field.
The National Ignition Facility, where scientists hope to achieve ignition for the first time, is scheduled to open at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California in 2010. Assuming ignition is achieved in the 2010-2012 time scale, scientists will begin directly addressing how one might utilize this prodigious energy for electricity generation.
Lead author of the Science paper is Ryan Rygg, formerly a Physics Department graduate student and a recent PhD recipient at MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) now at Lawrence Livermore. Other MIT authors are Fredrick Seguin and Johan Frenje, research scientists at the PSFC; Chikang Li, principal research scientist at the PSFC; and Mario Manuel, graduate student in aeronautics and astronautics.
The research was funded by the Fusion Science Center for Extreme States of Matter and Fast Ignition at the University of Rochester and the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Inertial Confinement.

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/fusion-0228.html

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Making fusion on earth

For fusion to be used on earth, a hot plasma needs to be kept together at the right density, at a high enough temperature, and for long enough. One of the approaches to accomplish this is to exploit the charge of the particles. Charged particles are deflected by a magnetic field and, if the field is strong enough, particles will orbit round a field line, gradually progressing along it if they have some longitudinal velocity. This feature forms the basis of magnetic confinement fusion, which has been under investigation since the 1950s.
In the early days a number of different confinement schemes were tried out. Initial investigations were on linear devices, but loss of particles from the ends of these machines quickly led to experiments which wrapped the field round to form a torus.
Unfortunately, in such a torus, the toroidal field gets weaker across the minor diameter. Thus the particle orbit around the field line is tighter on the high field (inboard) side than on the low field (outboard) side. The result is a movement of the ions upwards and electrons downwards in the plasma, and the resulting electric field makes the plasma drift radially out of the torus.
Two approaches get round this problem. Although the plasma is globally neutral, it can conduct electrical current due to the independently moving positively and negatively charged particles of which it is composed. In the tokamak, therefore, a current pulse in the primary winding (the central solenoid), placed in the hole of the torus, creates an electric field and hence drives a large current in the plasma ring, which serves as the sole secondary winding of a transformer. This plasma current provides a component of poloidal field in the plasma. In conjunction with the toroidal field provided by coils placed around the torus, this causes each field line to spiral round the plasma torus, generating a magnetic surface. Particles orbiting the field line are constrained near this surface, unless they collide with other particles.


Figure 1:from "Harnessing the Energy of the Stars"
by J. Tachon, P-J. Paris

These "flux" surfaces are nested and essentially axisymmetric (i.e the same shape wherever one cuts the small cross-section of the torus). For certain values of current and toroidal field the field lines will spiral an integral number of times round the major circumference of the torus for a (usually different) integral number of journeys round the minor circumference of a flux surface. The number and location of these "rational surfaces" inside the plasma can cause the plasma to kink or exhibit other "magnetohydrodynamic instabilities", which are controlled by careful design choices of current, field, etc.
To take account of the radial drift, this plasma current is also reacted with an applied vertical field. This produces a radial inwards force on the plasma ring. The "poloidal field coils" that generate this vertical field also are used to add beneficial shaping to the plasma minor cross section (stretching it vertically), and to generate channels for particle and energy exhaust.

The stellarator
An alternative approach is the stellarator. This provides helical external coils which twist around the torus, again causing nested surfaces formed by spiralling field lines inside the torus. The flux surface pattern is non-axisymmetric, varying cyclically along the toroidal direction. The plasma is kinked in a controlled way, according to the number of twists of the external coils, and no net inductively-driven (i.e by transformer action) toroidal plasma current is needed. Hence the stellarator is inherently a steady state device, unlike the tokamak, which needs current drive via plasma heating systems to supplement the transformer inductive drive if the burn pulse is to be very long.

Figure 2:from "Harnessing the Energy of the
Stars" by J. Tachon, P-J. Paris

The degree of field line twist is different in the two approaches, and both schemes have been studied, with the tokamak producing the best results over the last few decades. In the meantime, greater understanding of the stellarator and in modelling its geometry has led to its re-emergence in more recent years as a potential confinement option, and its investigation is being continued. The scale of stellarator experiments being built or operated today is, however, only comparable to that available for the tokamak in the early 1980s.

Inertial Fusion
A very different approach to achieving the necessary conditions for fusion is to exploit the inertia (mass) of the particles. Inertial fusion involves the firing many times per second of high energy particle or laser beams from all directions at tiny solid fuel pellets in a reaction chamber. Material sputtered off the pellet by the high energy beams drives a shock wave towards the pellet centre, raising its temperature and density. This implosion leads to sufficient fusion reactions occurring to overcome the losses, and a large amount of energy is released in a "micro-explosion". The resulting alpha particles, neutrons, and radiation flow radially out towards the reaction chamber walls. These are situated far enough (typically metres) away and built so as to be able to withstand the loads.

Figure 3:from "The Fusion Quest" by T.K.Fowler, ISBN-0801854563

Inertial fusion has been developed up to now with the main interest in the fact that it produces an excellent analogue of the explosion of a nuclear weapon on a small scale, and therefore can provide a testbed for equipment resilience in such an event, without the need for a weapons test. Increasingly, this interest is being supplemented by investigations of its use for power production. The major experiments worldwide are NIF in the USA and Megajoule in France.


http://www.iter.org/a/index_nav_2.htm

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New Internet Society with Satellites

The Internet is now an integral part of our lives; but its infrastructure levels vary. In general, urban areas with a large population have a better Internet environment, whereas some mountainous regions and remote islands are not well-equipped with Internet infrastructure due to its costs.
The KIZUNA (WINDS) does not require costly ground equipment. If you install a small antenna (about 45 cm in diameter) at your house, you can receive data at up to 155Mbps and transmit data at up to 6 Mbps. With a larger antenna of about 5 meters in diameter, super high-speed data communications of up to 1.2 Gbps will be available. (Such a service is mainly for organizations and companies.) Therefore, even in some areas where major ground infrastructure for the Internet is difficult to establish, people can enjoy the same level of Internet service as that in urban areas.
Using an antenna for South East Asian countries, we are aiming to achieve super high-speed communications with nations in the Asia/Pacific region with which Japan has close ties.
Large-volume and high-speed communications provided by the KIZUNA (WINDS) are expected to be useful in various areas. For example, we will be able to contribute to "remote medicine" that enables everybody to receive sophisticated medical treatment regardless of time and location by transmitting clear images of the conditions of a patient to a doctor in an urban area from a remote area or island where few doctors are available. In academic and educational fields, schools and researchers in remote areas can exchange information easily. To help cope with disasters, information can be swiftly provided through space.

KIZUNA (WINDS): Expanding the utilization of space-based, high-speed Internet

• 1. Disaster Network
  Even when a ground-based network is severed by a disaster in Japan or in other Asian countries, broadband network communications can still be secured by the KIZUNA using an additional small antenna. By installing a small antenna, high-resolution images, such as high definition images, can be securely sent to a disaster countermeasures office via the KIZUNA. Therefore, the satellite is expected to function as a reliable pipeline between a disaster stricken area and a countermeasures office.
  
• 2. Solving information availability disparity
  The Internet's infrastructure is well-established in urban areas in Japan. However, a similar Internet environment is not available in many mountainous regions and remote islands in Japan and in other Asian countries. The KIZUNA can provide a broadband Internet environment and super-high speed communications that are at a level with those in city areas to regions where such communication methods are currently out of reach.
  
• 3. Remote education
  The satellite-based Internet is also expected to become a useful tool in the educational field. Using conventional satellite communications, a small time lag often exists between conversations because communications are conveyed via relay stations. With the KIZUNA, conversation will be smoothly exchanged, thus, when terminals in various schools in Japan or even in Asian countries are directly connected, students can communicate as if they are all in the same classroom.
  
• 4. Remote medicine
  By connecting with urban areas via the KIZUNA, residents who live in mountainous regions and remote islands where no major hospital is available can receive the same level of medical treatment and physical checkups as those who live in cities. The KIZUNA will enable remote diagnosis, as the conditions of a patient can be transmitted by high-definition images to a specialist in an urban hospital, who can then diagnose the problem and advise a local doctor in a rural area to provide appropriate treatment.

The KIZUNA is also expected to be useful in various fields by connecting Japan to other Asian countries and space. For example data acquired by the Daichi satellite can be provided to Asian countries more quickly via the KIZUNA.


http://www.jaxa.jp/countdown/f14/ove...ication_e.html

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Place a uranium fuel rod in a nuclear reactor, and all sorts of interesting things start to happen.

Once self-sustaining nuclear fission begins, the resultant chain reaction causes uranium atoms to decay into xenon, krypton and other elements that zip around the fuel, knocking atoms loose from the fuel’s ordered, crystalline structure. Fractures, cracks and voids form. Air bubbles created during the manufacturing process migrate around the hot fuel and join together to form larger pockets.
Nuclear engineers expect these natural processes to occur, changing how fuel conducts heat and responds to stress over its lifetime. Through decades of engineering and experimental analysis, nuclear scientists have developed a number of simple computer models that describe fuel performance and other reactor behavior. These “legacy” models provide good approximations of what happens in present-day reactors. But Generation IV reactors, candidates for the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership and the Next Generation Nuclear Reactor, will be significantly different. Some will run at high temperatures, demand new materials to handle corrosive coolants, and require passive safety features.
“These are reactors that are really going to be very efficient and reliable,” says Ronaldo Szilard, who heads the INL Nuclear Science and Engineering Division. “In order to have effective designs, we’re going to need new models with much better fidelity.”
To facilitate new reactor design, INL researchers are working on creating a new, multiphysics simulation capability that will model a reactor from the scale of atoms to an entire reactor assembly. This effort represents a fundamentally different approach to nuclear simulation, one that will stretch computational physics and capacity. At the end of the road, researchers hope, will be a bottom-up nuclear reactor simulation with improved predictive capabilities, one that can assist in reactor design; improving safety, boosting efficiency and helping researchers anticipate challenges years in advance.

This image illustrates an all-hexahedral element computational mesh of a simplified model of the
Advanced Test Reactor at INL. Meshes such as this one support INL's advanced reactor modeling
activities that involve collaborations between scientists at INL, Los Alamos National Laboratory and
Sandia National Laboratories. Figure is courtesy of Scott Lucas and Glen Hansen,
INL, and Steve Owen, Sandia National Laboratories.

Solving coupled problems
Nuclear reactors are full of physical processes that are difficult for computer scientists to model. Fuel degradation is a prime example. When cracks form in uranium fuel, they change the structure of the fuel rods, affecting how the fuel conducts heat. In turn, the way fuel conducts heat impacts how its structure changes over time.
Although it seems like a chicken-and-egg problem, in nature these two processes work in lockstep; what physicists call “coupling.” But traditional approaches have only been able to model such complex, intertwined problems by treating each process separately. Simplifying or removing the coupling between physical processes makes them easier to solve computationally, but it also introduces a number of inaccuracies into simulations, many of which could have significant effects on Generation IV designs. “You lose a lot of important information with existing models,” says Szilard. “The challenge here is to fit the entire problem into one simulation instead of solving individual processes independently. To do that, the whole computational process needs to be changed.”
Fuel Performance Prediction
Nowadays, understanding the limits and properties of fuel is an expensive experimental process. After manufacturing test fuel, nuclear researchers must place the fuel in a test reactor, remove it to analyze the damage, then repeat the process until the design works as desired. From these experiments, physicists developed quantitative models that describe what to expect as fuel is used up in a reactor. But due to historical computer limitations, these models are restricted to one dimension, and because they depend on experiments, the results are only useful for a specific type of fuel and specific test conditions.
“The old models are strongly based on correlations or empirical models you develop by looking at the data,” says INL mathematician Glen Hansen. “The problem is if the new reactor is a fundamentally different design, it’s probably not going to behave the same way as the test reactor used to develop that data.” To develop next generation nuclear reactors, computer scientists need next generation models: ones that work in three dimensions, are more flexible and reduce the reliance on experiments. “The next step is to go back to the basic equations of physics,” Hansen says.
One of the first steps to solving coupled physics problems is to solve them in small chunks. “Although the same physical principles are in effect over an entire reactor, you can’t solve that complex system of equations directly on the computer,” says Hansen. “You have to break the problem up into little tiny pieces to form a mesh.” Hansen’s specialty is developing meshes that divide up objects, from fuel cladding to the swirling water that cools a reactor, into smaller areas the computer can model. In a simulation, each area within the fuel mesh, for example, will contain a host of physical information; including temperature, the number of neutrons being created, and structural state. Meshing is an important stage in developing a model that can solve coupled problems like predicting fuel degradation. “A high quality mesh, in conjunction with advanced multiphysics methods, gives you the mathematics needed to couple physics problems together and lets you solve them without losing accuracy,” Hansen says. “It’s only very recently that we’ve developed the mathematical methods to solve these complex issues and computers powerful enough to solve them on.”

Nuclear fuel can accumulate many types of damage over the course of its lifetime, including:
a) air pockets that merge and migrate to create a void in the center of the fuel and
b) buildup of fission products.
Images from Donald R. Olander, "Fundamental Aspects of Nuclear Reactor Fuel Elements," TID-26711-P1,
National Technical Information Service, U.S. Department of Commerce, Springfield, VA 22161, ISBN 0-87079-031-5 (v.1)

Using meshing and other computational tools, Hansen is working to develop a model that can predict fuel performance over the course of its lifetime. In the long term, he hopes to further enhance his multiphysics approach by adding information on what happens to fuel at the smallest scales.
Down to the atomic level
To develop a truly predictive model of fuel performance, the multiphysics team is partnering with Dieter Wolf and his colleagues in the INL Materials Properties and Performance Department to study how radiation affects nuclear fuel at the atomic scale.
As the first step in building a model of uranium dioxide fuel, physicist Tapan Desai tested how a heated block of millions of uranium and oxygen ions deforms when stretched. On the computer monitor, Desai’s simulation is built to approximate what a fuel rod looks like at the atomic level: adjacent patches of differently-oriented crystals. The boundaries between these crystals are the weakest points in a material, the likeliest places for cracks to form. Atoms move rapidly in these spaces, and to a lesser extent within the crystals themselves. When a material is stretched, these rearrangements can have a permanent effect on the structure.
Desai’s simulated uranium dioxide behaved much like the actual ceramic does in laboratory tests when stretched at high temperature. Building on these baseline simulations, the team is now working on the next step: colliding fast-moving atoms into the simulated material to study radiation effects. Wolf’s team is also working on ways to scale simulations up to the microscopic level and longer time scales.
“These simulations of atomic-level polycrystalline uranium dioxide are first of their kind,” says Desai. While predicting what happens to an entire piece of fuel, even over the course of a single day, is still far off, the researchers say understanding what happens to uranium dioxide at the molecular level will directly contribute to a full, multiphysics reactor simulation. “The insights we gain from this work will help us create more accurate models of material properties, a critical component in developing and licensing the next generation of nuclear reactors,” says Desai.
Turbulence and Beyond
In addition to simulating fuel, the multiphysics team is developing models to understand turbulent coolant flows through the core of a reactor and how coolant transports heat away from the core. The solution will help simulate another coupled, chicken-and-egg physics problem - the relationship between coolant temperature and fission rate.

A simulation of uranium dioxide shows how fractures can form in the material
when it is stretched. Courtesy T. Desai.

The bigger goal is to create a model that pulls together computational solutions to all the tricky reactor problems, from fuel damage and materials performance to coolant flow and neutronics. Creating a simulation that incorporates so many different physical processes will not be easy. “It’s a great problem to work on,” says computational physicist Dana Knoll, who heads up the multiphysics effort. “To get where we want to go, it’s going to stretch the limits of our computational mathematics and well as the power of our computing.” While it will take a number of years to achieve a working predictive nuclear reactor simulation, researchers say the payoffs, in efficiency and safety, are well worth the effort.

http://www.inl.gov/featurestories/2008-01-02.shtml

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Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have described a new method of imaging nuclear fusion reactions. The technique uses a second fusion reaction as a "flash" to photograph a reaction designed to generate energy. As a result, the researchers now have a way of measuring their success as they proceed toward clean, safe nuclear fusion reactors.
The "flash" camera methodology uses matter (protons), instead of light (photons). Unlike photons, protons have a charge, and thus can image the electrical and magnetic fields surrounding a nuclear fusion reaction.
"What we are doing is very much like taking an X-ray, except that instead of using photons we are using protons, which has never been done before," said Richard Petrasso, senior research scientist at MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center. "Because protons have a positive charge, they are deflected by the magnetic and electrical fields surrounding the nuclear implosion, helping us learn about its dynamics, giving us new insights into what is taking place and hopefully getting us closer to the ultimate goal of nuclear fusion using ignition."
Nuclear fusion is the process of fusing deuterium and tritium, forming helium-5, which immediately decays into helium-4 and a neutron, thereby releasing vast amounts of energy. Ignition is an alternative method of inducing nuclear fusion reactions, and is finding favor after years of only marginal success using magnetic confinement for fusion reactors.

Doctoral candidates Dan Casey and Mario Manuel along with
MIT professor Richard Petrasso (left to right) work on the detector
used to study nuclear implosions. (Photo by Sean McDuffee).

Ignition uses laser beams, instead of magnetic fields, to induce nuclear fusion reactions. By shining 40 or more laser beams on a tiny pellet of deuterium-tritium, inertia causes the atoms to fuse. MIT's flash-camera technique uses a second set of 20 lasers to implode a second pellet of helium-3, which is located about a centimeter away. The second implosion releases a uniform wave of protons all with a single energy level--15 million electron volts--which are deflected by the first implosion, in effect taking a flash photograph when imaged by a detector.
The deuterium-tritium pellet is about two millimeters in diameter with a hollow core shell measuring about 200-microns-thick. By using laser beams directly, or by creating high energy X-rays from them in indirect inertial confinement, the force implodes the pellet, squeezing it up to 30 times smaller.
If inertial confinement can squeeze the pellet down to less than 66 microns, raising the temperature inside it to 100 million degrees, or about seven times hotter than the center of the sun, then nuclear ignition results, fusing the pellet as nuclear fuel and releasing abundant energy.
Unfortunately, nuclear ignition has never been achieved.
"What we can do so far is a little like holding a match to a log; you can get it to smolder a little bit, with smoke coming off, but you can't get it to really burn. And until then, we haven't ignited it," said Petrasso.
However, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is currently constructing a fusion reactor based on inertial confinement that it hopes will achieve ignition of deuterium-tritium pellets. Its National Ignition Facility (NIF) will start ignition experiments in 2010. MIT's work on imaging the reactions is an attempt to pave the way for NIF's efforts.
The main requirement for success, according to Petrasso, is maintaining an almost perfect spherical shape as the pellet implodes. Even the slightest perturbations can cause the pellet to change shape, thus spoiling the implosion and preventing ignition.
The principle used to compress the pellet is Newton's third law of reciprocal actions: As a laser beam ablates material off the surface of the pellet an equal and opposite force compresses the remaining material inward. If an almost perfectly spherical shape can be maintained during the few nanoseconds it takes the pellet to compress 30 times, then ignition theoretically will occur, causing the pellet to burn in a controlled manner rather than in a uncontrolled chain reaction.
If ignition can be demonstrated by NIF, then theoretically a reactor could be fed with a constant stream of nuclear pellets. As little as one megajoule of laser energy can release up to 150 megajoules from the reaction.
Now that the MIT scientists have invented a way to observe the electric and magnetic fields around the pellets, they will fine tune the technique by observing spherical shape and controlling the process with enough precision to induce nuclear ignition.
Funded for the fusion research was provided by the Fusion Science Center for Extreme States of Matter and Fast Ignition at the University of Rochester and the U.S. Energy Department's Office of Inertial Confinement.


http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/s...leID=206900969

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AMD has announced it has worked closely with Microsoft throughout the Windows Server 2008 development process, to deliver the ultimate server solution. Through their strong partnership, both companies have optimised their respective hardware and software technologies to work together to address the demands of today's global digital economy and meet the computing requirements of businesses of all sizes.
AMD Opteron processors were designed with 64-bit computing in mind and in combination with Windows Server 2008 they deliver a powerful platform for running business solutions that can maximise productivity and profitability. Customers using AMD Opteron processors, including Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors, and Windows Server 2008 can experience unparalleled performance, energy efficiency and investment protection, further pushing virtualisation, web serving, and business intelligence capabilities into the mainstream.
"We congratulate Microsoft on the release of the next generation Windows Server operating system," said Randy Allen, corporate vice president, Server and Workstation Division, AMD. "At AMD, we believe the ultimate server solution begins with the ultimate collaboration. Windows Server 2008 with Microsoft's hypervisor-based server virtualisation technology (Hyper-V) will leverage the industry-leading performance of the AMD Opteron processor to deliver the level of support needed to fuel tomorrow's business innovation. Additionally, Microsoft and AMD's robust product architectures allow customers to scale with ease, while providing unmatched performance, a reduced overall cost of ownership and a flexible infrastructure that can evolve as their organisation grows."
In 2002, AMD and Microsoft began a collaboration to bring the benefits of 64-bit computing to the x86 computing market. Today, this strong technology partnership continues and is driving innovations that are helping customers run more efficient and cost-effective businesses. Since AMD is a trusted technology partner to Microsoft, AMD technology-based platforms are used as development and test systems throughout Microsoft's product development cycle. The AMD64 technology-based servers and clients are also used as development and test systems throughout Microsoft's development product development cycle. By leveraging the power of an AMD-Microsoft optimised solution such as Windows Server 2008, customers can take advantage of balanced, scalable solutions that are easy to manage and operate in today's demanding business environment.
"Our customers are excited about the vibrant ecosystem that has developed around Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008," said Bob Muglia, senior vice president of the Server and Tools Business at Microsoft Corp. "The combined power of Windows Server 2008 and AMD Opteron processors will help customers achieve flexible, reliable and powerful technology solutions."
AMD and Microsoft customer Nivio is an example of a growing, innovative start-up business that is leveraging the two companies' technologies to deliver the desktop experience as a service to almost anyone with an Internet-enabled device, anywhere in the world.
"AMD and Microsoft technologies are very complementary and perfect for our environment," said Nivio Founder and CEO Sachin Duggal. "The AMD Opteron processor offers innovations like HyperTransport technology which allow us to support an exceptional amount of users with optimal levels of performance and availability?all while keeping costs low for us. And we can deliver one of the world?s leading operating systems virtually to countless users worldwide, knowing that for our environment, the current and future versions of Microsoft Windows Server are ideal for their stability and ease of use."
AMD and Microsoft are committed to leading the world to energy-efficient processing. Windows Server 2008 fully supports the Enhanced AMD PowerNow technology of Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors, which along with innovations such as AMD CoolCore Technology and Dual Dynamic Power Management; offer the ability to help reduce power and cooling requirements. Additionally, Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors can provide increased performance-per-watt efficiencies while maintaining the same power and thermal infrastructure as previous generations of AMD Opteron processors.
Additionally, an AMD Opteron processor-based server running Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 includes unique optimisations designed to increase throughput to deliver high speed and performance for memory and data intensive Business Intelligence applications. The joint solution offers large memory footprints and outstanding processing bandwidth, bringing Business Intelligence more mainstream, to enterprise and SMB customers alike.


http://www.eetindia.co.in/ART_880050...T_c8ce8cf9.HTM

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A simple way to pattern organic semiconductor material could mean cheap, large, bendable electronics.

Researchers have found a quick and simple way to make arrays of high-performance electronic devices from organic semiconductor material. The development, led by researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), in Gaithersburg, MD, could lead to a simple, low-cost method to manufacture large, flexible electronic circuits that use organic semiconductors.
The researchers coax organic semiconductor molecules to self-assemble around chemically pretreated electrodes to form field-effect transistors, which are often used to switch pixels on and off in displays. The technique results in an array of transistors that have good electrical properties and are insulated from one another. While the current work was done on a hard silicon substrate, it should be transferable to flexible substrates, says David Gundlach, the NIST researcher who led the work.
Current flat-panel displays, such as liquid crystal displays, are rigid because they use amorphous silicon to make the transistors that control the pixels. Organic electronic circuits could pave the way for roll-up displays: foldable electronic readers, large screens that can be rolled up and tucked into cell phones, and smart bandages that monitor wounds and sense the need for drugs. However, a practical method to cheaply produce high-performance organic electronic circuits has proved elusive.
The new technique, presented in Nature Materials, could be faster, and hence cheaper, than current methods to make flexible circuits. There are several existing ways to make organic circuits over large areas. One is a lithographic technique similar to those used to make conventional silicon chips; this involves coating the entire circuit's surface with the organic semiconductor and then etching it away wherever it is not needed. A more efficient method is inkjet printing, in which nozzles put down liquid droplets of plastic semiconductors in a desired pattern. In fact, two companies that have announced plans to commercially manufacture plastic electronics use these two different methods. (See "Plastic Electronics Head for Market.")
The new method eliminates the need to pattern the semiconductor layer. Once the researchers have patterned the source and drain electrodes using lithography, they dip the circuit in a special chemical to treat the electrode surface. Then they coat the circuit with a thin layer of an organic semiconductor solution.
Near the electrodes, the semiconductor crystals assemble themselves in an ordered way so that they carry current well. Away from the electrodes, however, crystals are randomly oriented so that the material acts as an insulator. "Now we can make circuits without patterning [the semiconductor] at all," says Thomas Jackson, an electrical engineering professor at Pennsylvania State University, who was involved in the work. "We simply spin it on and we're done. We don't have to go through the step of removing the material where we don't want it."
Getting rid of this step makes the manufacturing process significantly simpler, says John Kymissis, an electrical engineering professor at Columbia University. Patterning the semiconductor layer is one of the most delicate steps in making an organic electronic circuit, he says. If any semiconductor material accidentally spans the electrodes of two adjacent transistors, that could allow current to flow between transistors, making the circuit dysfunctional. In a display, for instance, two pixels might go on instead of one. "Even if you print the electrodes, if you don't have to pattern the organic semiconductor, [the process] is going to be faster," says Kymissis. "It is a huge advantage."
Compared with current techniques, the simplicity of the new method should make it more practical to manufacture organic electronic circuits on a large scale, says Natalie Stingelin-Stutzmann, a materials-science researcher at Queen Mary, University of London. "Inkjet is simple, but if you can cover large areas with a simple coating technique, it will be cheaper," she says. "At the end, it is the cost which will determine if organic electronics makes it or not."


http://www.technologyreview.com/Nanotech/20368/page1/

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One of the challenges of parallel programming is synchronizing concurrent access to shared memory. Today, programmers use locks for synchronization, but locks have many pitfalls that make them difficult to use for building large, robust, parallel applications.

In the past several years, my group has been working on a new synchronization construct called transactional memory. Transactional memory promises to address many of the pitfalls of locks, providing a synchronization construct that supports composing robust parallel applications in a much better way than locks can.
The idea behind transactional memory (TM) is to replace lock-based synchronization with transactions over shared memory. Using a new transactional language construct, the programmer can declare that a particular code block should execute atomically and in isolation, as if the whole block executes in an all-or-nothing fashion without any interference from other threads. Meanwhile, the system under the hood allows multiple transactions to execute concurrently as long as it can still provide the illusion of atomicity and isolation.
Databases have used transactions for decades so the idea of using transactions for concurrency control is not new. TM simply brings some of the ideas that have proven so successful in databases to mainstream programming languages such as C++ and Java, and to future languages that will support parallelism from the ground up.
The problems with locks
When using locks, a programmer faces a basic tension between ease of use and scalability. Simplistic coarse-grain locking is easy to use but can result in synchronization bottlenecks that hurt scalability. There are several ways you (the programmer) can eliminate these bottlenecks: You can associate locks with individual data elements (fine-grain locking) so that different threads can access disjoint data concurrently. You can use reader-writer locks for individual data elements so that more than one thread can read the same data element concurrently. Or, if you are one of the few genius programmers who understands memory models or non-blocking algorithms, you can try to eliminate locks and write code in which concurrent threads access shared data without any locking (send me your resume if you know how to do this).
The problem with these optimizations is that they risk introducing bugs due to deadlocks and data races. Programmers who do these kinds of optimizations know how tricky it is to get them right.
What’s perhaps worse is that locks don’t support composition. By this I mean that with locks it’s hard to build scalable, thread-safe software components that can be composed together in a manner that doesn’t introduce concurrency bugs but still retains scalability. Even after you’ve performed optimizations and built a scalable software component, once other programmers use your component to create applications, they’ll likely wrap a lock around pieces of code that use your component, effectively reverting to coarse grain locking and losing the benefits of your tuning. If you want other programmers to use your software component and still retain the scalability that you worked so hard to achieve, you have to define and expose locking protocols through the component’s interface. Today’s languages provide no support for expressing, enforcing, or validating locking protocols, so the best you can do is to use comments to specify the protocols and hope that clients of the interface use locks correctly.
Because it’s hard to compose applications using locks, locks don’t support mainstream application development very well. Today, developers build large, commercial applications by composing together software components that are written by different developers often working for different software vendors. Large applications can comprise many libraries that interact in complex and deeply nested ways. Some refer to the development of such applications as “programming in the large”, a phrase that characterizes the scale and complexity of both the programs and their development. To enable the development of commercial parallel applications, we need a synchronization mechanism that supports programming in the large better than locks do. Transactional memory promises to be such a mechanism.
Transactional memory
The best way to provide TM to the programmer is to introduce a new language construct of the form atomic { B } that executes the statements in block B as a transaction. Using an atomic block construct, the programmer simply declares that a block of code should execute atomically and in isolation. The system takes responsibility for implementing atomicity and isolation while allowing as much concurrency as possible. In this way, transactions improve the programmer’s productivity by shifting some of the difficult concurrency-control problems from the application developer to the system designer.
An implementation of TM compiles the atomic block statement to code that makes explicit calls into a TM library. The TM library tracks each memory access inside a transaction and allows transactions to execute in parallel as long as they don’t conflict; that is, as long as one of the transactions doesn’t write to a memory location that other concurrently executing transactions have also read or written.
Like with locks, the programmer has to use atomic blocks correctly to avoid high-level data races and ensure forward progress. The programmer has to use atomic blocks in a way that correctly protects program invariants and data structure consistency in the presence of concurrent updates by multiple threads. And, the programmer has to co-ordinate among threads correctly to avoid deadlock or livelock. Transactions don’t excuse the programmer from getting the synchronization and co-ordination correct in their application.
But unlike with locks, the programmer doesn’t have to deal with eliminating locking bottlenecks when using transactional memory. Rather than worry about optimizing locking bottlenecks and defining locking protocols to support modular software engineering, with transactions the programmer instead tunes the component to avoid conflicts between concurrent transactions. So the programmer still has to be concerned with the inherent scalability of the program’s underlying algorithms and data structures, but the hard optimization problems of using fine-grain locks, reader-write locks, or no locks at all are delegated to the compiler and TM library (possibly to the hardware also). Transactions thereby significantly reduce the tension between ease of use and scalability.
In many ways, transactional memory is similar to other language features such as garbage collection (GC) that improve program robustness and programmer productivity by delegating some difficult aspect of programming to the system. The GC analogy is actually a good one. GC delegates memory management to the system, eliminating some pitfalls associated with explicit memory management (such as dangling pointers) while alleviating other pitfalls (such as memory leaks). Garbage collection supports programming in the large by eliminating the need for programmer-defined memory management conventions at module interfaces (e.g., who has responsibility for freeing which piece of memory). But when programming in a garbage collected language, the programmer must still take care not to leak memory (e.g., by inserting objects into a large collection pointed to by a static field). Dan Grossman at University of Washington has a great article exploring the GC analogy.
For an overview of transactional memory, please see this ACM Queue article from last year.
The Intel Transactional Memory Compiler
My group at Intel has published a lot of our research on core TM technology, but our ultimate objective is to introduce new parallel programming technologies like TM into mainstream use. When introducing new programming technologies, the biggest hurdle is always getting a prototype into the hands of users so that you can get feedback to refine the technology and to improve its performance. One of our goals, therefore, has been to put this technology into the hands of early adopters. To this end, we’ve built a prototype that integrates transactions into the C programming language using the Intel production C compiler, and we’ve made this prototype available on whatif.intel.com. (We describe the underlying technology in this prototype in this paper that appeared in the CGO 2007 conference.) By making our prototype available, we hope to encourage early adopters to experiment with the TM programming model and to build TM workloads. We also hope to get feedback so that we can refine the programming model. I encourage you to download this prototype and experiment with TM.


http://blogs.intel.com/research/2008..._with_tran.php

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NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has found evidence of material orbiting Rhea, Saturn’s second largest moon. This is the first time rings may have been found around a moon.

A broad debris disk and at least one ring appear to have been detected by a suite of six instruments on Cassini specifically designed to study the atmospheres and particles around Saturn and its moons.
”Until now, only planets were known to have rings, but now Rhea seems to have some family ties to its ringed parent Saturn,” said Geraint Jones, a Cassini scientist and lead author on a paper that appears in the March 7 issue of the journal Science. Jones began this work while at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany, and is now at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory, University College, London.

Rhea is roughly 1,500 kilometers (950 miles) in diameter. The apparent debris disk measures several thousand miles from end to end. The particles that make up the disk and any embedded rings probably range from the size of small pebbles to boulders. An additional dust cloud may extend up to 5,900 kilometers (3,000 miles) from the moon’s center, almost eight times the radius of Rhea.
”Like finding planets around other stars, and moons around asteroids, these findings are opening a new field of rings around moons,” said Norbert Krupp, a scientist with Cassini’s Magnetospheric Imaging Instrument from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research.
Since the discovery, Cassini scientists have carried out numerical simulations to determine if Rhea can maintain rings. The models show that Rhea’s gravity field, in combination with its orbit around Saturn, could allow rings that form to remain in place for a very long time.
The discovery was a result of a Cassini close flyby of Rhea in November 2005, when instruments on the spacecraft observed the environment around the moon. Three instruments sampled dust directly. The existence of some debris was expected because a rain of dust constantly hits Saturn’s moons, including Rhea, knocking particles into space around them. Other instruments’ observations showed how the moon was interacting with Saturn’s magnetosphere, and ruled out the possibility of an atmosphere.
Evidence for a debris disk in addition to this tenuous dust cloud came from a gradual drop on either side of Rhea in the number of electrons detected by two of Cassini’s instruments. Material near Rhea appeared to be shielding Cassini from the usual rain of electrons. Cassini’s Magnetospheric Imaging Instrument detected sharp, brief drops in electrons on both sides of the moon, suggesting the presence of rings within the disk of debris. The rings of Uranus were found in a similar fashion, by NASA’s Kuiper Airborne Observatory in 1977, when light from a star blinked on and off as it passed behind Uranus’ rings.
”Seeing almost the same signatures on either side of Rhea was the clincher,” added Jones. “After ruling out many other possibilities, we said these are most likely rings. No one was expecting rings around a moon.”
One possible explanation for these rings is that they are remnants from an asteroid or comet collision in Rhea’s distant past. Such a collision may have pitched large quantities of gas and solid particles around Rhea. Once the gas dissipated, all that remained were the ring particles. Other moons of Saturn, such as Mimas, show evidence of a catastrophic collision that almost tore the moon apart.
”The diversity in our solar system never fails to amaze us,” said Candy Hansen, co-author and Cassini scientist on the Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “Many years ago we thought Saturn was the only planet with rings. Now we may have a moon of Saturn that is a miniature version of its even more elaborately decorated parent.”
These ring findings make Rhea a prime candidate for further study. Initial observations by the imaging team when Rhea was near the sun in the sky did not detect dust near the moon remotely. Additional observations are planned to look for the larger particles.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The Magnetospheric Imaging Instrument was designed, built and is operated by an international team led by the Applied Physics Laboratory of the Johns Hopkins University, Laurel, Md.


http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2008-039

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Less than nothing" is the new zero

The world of quantum mechanics is filled with outlandish physical phenomena -- including everything from perpetual motion to teleportation. Scientists have sought, in recent years, to exploit these phenomena to create the ultimate computing machine. Such a computer, which would put even Intel or IBM's mightiest system to shame, holds the promise to solve certain types of very difficult, but very important problems.

Scientists have made large advances including creating cables for quantum computers, developing quantum encryption techniques, and the development of the first commercial quantum computer by D-Wave, co-developed by NASA. Much of the research into quantum computing involves using photons to store and convey information inside advanced computer systems. However, light on an atomic scale behaves rather "spooky."
On a silicon transistor scale, for the most part "on" or 1 means charged, and "off" or 0 means no charge. On a quantum scale, on still means a charge, but "off" or absence of light still produces a lesser amount of atomic noise. In other words, even if a photon is turned off, the quantum computer will still read a small amount of noise, disrupting measurements.
Scientists, after puzzling over this complex problem have come up with an outlandish solution -- creating a "squeezed vacuum" a space which has less than nothing, less noise than a space with no light. Scientists managed to store and retrieve this "perfect dark" quantum zero. The special vacuum is created by a laser beam directed through special crystals. Squeezed vacuums have previously been created but not stored. Typical uses are gravity wave detection.
Teams of physicists at the University of Calgary and the Tokyo Institute of Technology independently demonstrated that a squeezed vacuum can be stored in a collection of rubidium atoms and retrieved when necessary. The work appears in today's edition of the physics journal Physical Review Letters. In it the researchers detail how they verified that the space remained squeezed when retrieved, compared to no light.
Alexander Lvovsky, professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, Canada Research Chair and leader of the University of Calgary's Quantum Information Technology research group, stated, "Memory for light has been a big challenge in physics for many years and I am very pleased we have been able to bring it one step further. It is important not only for quantum computers, but may also provide new ways to make unbreakable codes for transmitting sensitive information."
The team's research followed Harvard-Smithsonian scientists' 2001 work that slowed light to a stop and physicist Alexander Kuzmich of the Georgia Institute of Technology's work, which led to a successful 2006 effort to store and retrieve a photon. Kuzmich was enthusiastic about the new developments and said that the ability to squeeze space closer to an absolute zero in terms of noise promises to significantly aid in the development of quantum networks. He marveled at the work and said of the progress, "It's a real technical achievement."
Lvovsky’s team next hopes to develop storage methods for more complex forms of light, such as entangled light, which can lead to exotic new uses and improvements in quantum computing.


http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=10994

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IBM researchers announced Friday a discovery that combats one of the industry's most perplexing problems in using graphite -- the same material found inside pencils -- as a material for building nanoelectonic circuits vastly smaller than those found in today's silicon based computer chips.

For the first time anywhere, IBM scientists have found a way to suppress unwanted interference of electrical signals created when shrinking graphene, a two-dimensional, single-atomic layer thick form of graphite, to dimensions just a few atoms long.
Scientists around the world are exploring the use of graphene as a much smaller replacement for today's silicon transistors. Graphene is a two-dimensional honeycomb lattice of carbon atoms, similar to atomic-scale chicken-wire, which has attracted strong scientific and technological interest because it exhibits promising electrical properties and could be used in transistors and circuits at scales vastly smaller than components inside of today's tiniest computer chips.
One problem in using these nano-devices is the inverse relationship between the size of the device and the amount of uncontrolled electrical noise that is generated: as they are made smaller and smaller, the noise -- electrical charges that bounce around the material causing all sorts of interference that impede their usefulness -- grows larger and larger. This trend is known as Hooge's rule, and occurs in traditional silicon based devices as well as in graphene nano-ribbons and carbon nanotube based devices.
"The effect of noise from Hooge's rule is exaggerated at the nanoscale because the dimensions are approaching the nearly smallest limits, down to only a handful of atoms, and the noise that is created can overwhelm the electrical signal that needs to be achieved to be useful," said IBM Researcher Dr. Phaedon Avouris, who leads IBM's exploration into carbon nanotubes and graphene. "To quote the famous physicist Rolf Landauer, at the nanoscale 'the noise is your signal'; in other words, you cannot produce any useful electronic device at the nanoscale if the noise is comparable to the signal you are trying to switch on and off."
Now, IBM scientists have found that the noise in graphene-based semiconductor devices can, in fact, be suppressed and report the results today in the journal Nano Letters.
In their experiments, the IBM Researchers first used a single layer, or sheet, of graphene to build a transistor and noted that the device does in fact follow Hooge's Rule: as they are made smaller and smaller, there is an increase in the noise that is created.
Two Layers Are Better Than One
However, when the IBM Researchers built the same device with two sheets of graphene instead of one -- one stacked on top of the other -- they noted that the noise is suppressed, and is weak enough that these so-called bilayer graphene ribbons could prove useful for building future semiconductor devices for use in sensors, communications devices, computing systems and more. The noise is inhibited because of the strong electronic coupling between the two graphene layers that counteracts the influence of the noise sources: the system acts as a noise insulator.
While further detailed analysis and studies are required to better understand these phenomena, the findings provide exciting opportunities for graphene bilayers in a variety of applications.
The report on this work, entitled "Strong Suppression of Electrical Noise in Bilayer Graphene Nanoribbons" by Yu-Ming Lin and Phaedon Avouris of IBM's T.J.Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. is available online at the journal Nano Letters: http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/abstract...nl080241l.html


http://www.physorg.com/news124120714.html

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Discuss This Article.Earlier this week we previewed the Quadro FX1700, which is one of NVIDIA's mid-range workstation graphics cards that is based upon the G84GL core that in turn is derived from the consumer-class GeForce 8600 series. This PCI Express graphics card offers 512MB of video memory with two dual-link DVI connections and support for OpenGL 2.1 while maintaining a maximum power consumption of just 42 Watts. As we mentioned in the preview article, we would be looking at this graphics card's performance not only under Linux but also testing this workstation solution in both Microsoft Windows and Sun's Solaris. In this article today, we are doing just that as we test the NVIDIA Quadro FX1700 512MB with each of these operating systems and their respective binary display drivers.

The last time we had looked at the NVIDIA performance under both Linux and Windows was last July when comparing the GeForce 8 performance as the Linux drivers at the time were experiencing some initial performance issues with the G80 GPUs. Back in July there was a rather large performance delta between the two operating systems and drivers for the GeForce 8500GT and 8600GT, but the mature 6600GT had performed virtually the same in both environments. Then in September, we had looked at NVIDIA's multi-GPU performance under Linux and Windows when running two GeForce 8600GT 256MB graphics cards in SLI (Scalable Link Interface). Windows XP and the ForceWare driver had outpaced Linux in every gaming test we conducted.

When it comes to Solaris testing, the last time we had carried out any comparative NVIDIA tests was back in June when looking at a GeForce 8500GT 256MB on Fedora and Solaris. NVIDIA's Linux and Solaris drivers are virtually identical and as such, the performance was very close between Fedora 7 and Solaris Express Developer 5/07 and Solaris Express Community Edition Build 66.

For today's workstation testing we had run the NVIDIA Quadro FX1700 512MB on Ubuntu 8.04 Alpha 5, Solaris Express Developer 1/08, and Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate. Ubuntu 8.04 uses the Linux 2.6.24 kernel and Solaris Express Developer Edition 1/08 is based upon Solaris Nevada Build 79b. Windows Vista was used over Windows XP because of compatibility problems with the Intel 5400 Chipset and Windows XP SP2. With each operating system we had used the latest supported NVIDIA drivers, which was 169.12 for Linux and Solaris and 169.25 for Windows Vista. During the testing, the screen resolution used was 1680 x 1050 and all settings from the NVIDIA drivers to the operating system were left at their defaults.
To benchmark these three operating systems and drivers we had used SPECViewPerf 9.0.3 to represent workstation use. SPECViewPerf 10.0 is not yet available for Linux/UNIX, which is why we are still using SPECViewPerf 9 for conducting these tests. We have published the results to all of the SPECViewPerf 9 tests: 3dsmax-04, catia-02, ensight-03, light-08, maya-02, proe-04, sw-01, ugnx-01, and tcvis-01. However, with the 3D Studio Max (3dsmax-04) test, Windows Vista was unable to complete the benchmark. SPECViewPerf is designed to be an OpenGL performance benchmark that is representative of real-world workstation performance through these different tests/view-sets such as 3D Studio Max, Maya, Pro/ENGINEER, and SolidWorks.

Aside from the PNY Quadro FX1700 512MB, the other hardware components consisted of a Tyan Tempest i5400XT motherboard, 4GB of Kingston DDR2-533 FB-DIMM RAM (8 x 512MB), dual Quad-Core Intel Xeon E5320 processors, Western Digital 160GB SATA 2.0 16MB cache hard drive, SATA DVD-RW drive, and a Cooler Master Real Power Pro 1000W PSU.

Continued@Link


http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...ion_perf&num=1

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If your child has a life-threatening disease and you're desperate to read the latest research, you'll be dismayed to learn that you can't -- at least not without hugely expensive subscriptions to a bevy of specialized journals or access to a major research library.
Your dismay might turn to anger when you realize that you paid for this research. Through the National Institutes of Health alone, American taxpayers funnel more than $28 billion annually into medical research. That's leaving aside the billions more in public spending on state universities or the tax exemptions granted for gifts to private campuses.

American institutions of higher education are knowledge machines of unprecedented fecundity, but much of the knowledge they produce is locked up in high-priced scholarly journals that most people can't easily get. Citizens thus find themselves in the position of paying for research and then paying again to buy it back from academic journals whose prices have been spiraling upward. Library Journal says that U.S. journal prices rose 9% last year alone. The average chemistry-journal subscription, to cite a single egregious example, was $3,429 for one year.
But change is on the horizon. Congress has mandated that by April 7 papers arising from NIH-sponsored research -- roughly 80,000 of them a year -- be made freely available in the federal PubMed database, which can be read by anyone with an Internet connection. Alas, the new NIH policy will allow a 12-month lag between publication and posting on PubMed.
Another blow for open access to scholarly research was struck recently by Harvard's arts and sciences faculty, whose members voted to publish on the Internet for all to see -- gratis. These professors will give Harvard world-wide nonexclusive license to their work, and the university will exercise it by posting their papers. The journals won't have much choice if they want the work of Harvard professors. The faculty members will still publish in expensive journals, but the move to put the same materials on the Internet is a stake poised at the heart of a vampire that has been sucking dollars out of academic institutions for years through the ever-sharper bite of subscription prices.
When the Association of Research Libraries talks about a "serials crisis," it doesn't mean a shortage of soap operas. The ARL reports that median annual spending for journals at 101 of its big member libraries rose to nearly $6 million in 2005 from $1.5 million in 1986, far outstripping the rate of inflation -- and the rate of increase in worthwhile journals.
In 2006, the editorial board of the venerable mathematics journal Topology resigned en masse over the high subscription price charged by publisher Elsevier, a dominant player in the industry. While Elsevier had been charging institutions $1,665 for six issues of Topology, the editors later produced a similar publication (quarterly instead of bimonthly) for $570 a year. A similarly motivated mass resignation occurred at K-Theory, another math publication, whose editors also went on to found a comparable journal elsewhere.
The nonprofit Public Library of Science has been in the vanguard, petitioning for change and launching scholarly publications of its own. Its journals in such fields as biology, genetics and tropical diseases are published electronically after peer review, and the contents are promptly made available at PubMed for all to see. Instead of charging subscribers, PLoS covers its costs by charging authors from $1,250 to $2,750 per article (usually paid by their institutions and reduced or waived for authors who can't pay). One virtue of this business model is that it might discourage, however slightly, the résumé-padding practice of slicing and dicing the same findings for publication in different journals.
Of course, academic journals serve other important functions besides carrying the news. Thanks to the work of paid editors and of professor-volunteers who serve as peer reviewers of submissions, these publications act as gateways, at least theoretically upholding scholarly standards and separating the academic wheat from the chaff. And they play a key role in the way scholars achieve tenure and prestige. But such functions could be retained, albeit at lower cost, by Internet-based journals freely accessible to all, as long as editors and peer reviewers remained on the job.
Other than in the realm of life-saving medicine, why should any of this matter to nonacademics? Well, for one thing, barriers to the spread of information are bad for capitalism. The dissemination of knowledge is almost as crucial as the production of it for the creation of wealth, and knowledge (like people) can't reproduce in isolation. It's easy to scoff at the rise of Madonna studies and other risible academic excrescences, but a flood of truly important research pours from campuses every day. The infrastructure that produces this work is surely one of America's greatest competitive advantages.
In fact, open access might help to moderate some of the worst forms of academic hokum, if only by holding them up to the light of day -- and perhaps by making taxpayers, parents and college donors more careful about where they send their money. Entering the realm of delirium for a moment, one can even imagine public exposure encouraging professors in the humanities and social sciences to write in plain English.
Keeping knowledge bottled up is also bad for the world's poor; indeed, opening up the research produced on America's campuses via the Internet is probably among the most cost-effective ways of helping underdeveloped countries rise from poverty. Closer to home, open access to scholarly work via the Internet would help counteract the plague of plagiarism that the Internet itself has abetted. Anyone suspecting a scholar of such chicanery could search for a phrase or two in Google and see if somebody else's work turns up with the same unusual text string.
In the future, it's likely that a new, more flexible model will develop in which some scholarly papers, published under the banner of an online journal, will be peer-reviewed, while others will appear without any such apparatus, destined to rise or fall based on their contents and their authors' reputations. The challenge, in the coming new world of open access, will be keeping the best of the current system while jettisoning the rest. Maybe some scholar would like to study the question -- and publish his findings for all to see.


http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120486540450119149.html

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China will continue to participate in an international nuclear fusion project that aims at incubating a sustained solution of energy production, a Chinese physicist said Tuesday, following the funding suspension of the United States.
Wan Baonian, deputy director of the Institute of Plasma Physics, which is located in eastern Chinese city of Hefei, under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, made the remarks in Beijing on the sidelines of the annual session of the country's top political advisory body.
"It (the U.S. suspension) won't affect China's arrangements for taking part in the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project," Wan told Xinhua.
Wan's institute is a participant in the 11-billion-euro project, which also involves the European Union, the United States, India, the Republic of Korea, Russia and Japan.
ITER has been the largest ever scientific research program under multinational collaboration aimed at studying the scientific and technical feasibility of the world's most advanced nuclear fusion reactor. The device is described as an "artificial sun" as it will create conditions similar to those occurring in solar nuclear fusion reactions.
If successful, the project could generate infinite, safe and clean energy to replace fossil fuels such as oil and coal, and will be 30 times more powerful than the Joint European Torus (JET),the largest comparable experiment.
The ITER agreement went into effect on Oct. 28 last year. Among its members, the EU will pay 45.4 percent of the total ITER budget, while China is responsible for 9.1 percent of the budget, which is equal to the percentage shared by each of the other five participating countries.
But the United States has suspended for this year its financial participation in the project for budgetary reasons, even though it had pledged 160 million dollars to it.
On China's part, the country will contribute about 10 billion yuan (1.4 billion U.S. dollars), or 10 percent of the total cost, to the project, and about half of China's contribution will be spent during the 10-year construction phase of the multi-nation undertaking.
Chinese researchers will be in charge of building components such as heating, diagnostic and remote maintenance equipment, as well as transporting it to Cadarache in the south of France, where the ITER reactor is expected to be set up and running by 2016.


http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/20...nt_7767895.htm

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Intel doesn't enter markets gently. Its new high-capacity solid-state drives (SSDs) are expected to jolt a market currently dominated by Samsung, Toshiba, and SanDisk.

At the moment, Intel offers small-capacity chip-level (what are called Thin Small Outline Packages or TSOPs) technology that provides end-product sizes ranging up to 16GB. But this modest line of products will get a big boost in the second quarter when Intel offers 1.8- and 2.5-inch SSDs ranging from 80GB to 160GB in capacity, said Troy Winslow, marketing manager for the NAND Products Group at Intel. Intel's new SSDs will compete with Samsung, for example, which is slated to bring out a 128GB SSD in the third quarter.
With new competition, drive speeds will jump. Currently, the fastest SSDs from companies like Samsung approach 100MB/second for reading data. "What I can tell you is ours is much better than that," Winslow said. Hard drives typically read data at about half this speed.
"We will be supplementing our product line with a SATA offering," he said. Serial ATA, or SATA, is an interface used in high-performance hard disk drives. Intel's products will be based on the SATA II specification that offers speeds of 3 gigabits (Gb) per second. Samsung is now shipping 64GB SSDs to Dell using the same technology.
"When Intel launches its...products, you'll see that not all SSDs are created equal," Winslow said. "The way the SSDs are architected, the way the controller and firmware operates makes a huge difference," he said, referring to the chip (controller) that manages the SSD and software (firmware) that the controller uses.
Intel believes 2008 is the year of the SSD. (See SSD primer below.) "For the first time, flash is going into the compute environment. In the last nine years or so when it experienced all of its growth, this has been in digital cameras and USB keys," Winslow said. But now flash memory, in the form of SSDs, will be used as the main storage device in PCs. "When you're putting all your critical applications and data into notebook or server (SSDs), who knows those markets better than the manufacturer that's supplying the world with CPUs," Winslow added.
While the latter statement seems like typical marketing spin, it's more than just spin in Intel's case. The largest chipmaker in the world is in a competitive position because it already supplies many of a PC's core components including the processor, chipset, communications silicon, and in some cases, the graphics processor. Add the main storage device to the mix, and--with the exception of an optical drive and screen--that's all the core component in a notebook PC.
But to be competitive with hard drives, SSD prices have to come down--a lot. In many cases, upgrading from a hard drive to an SSD in a notebook can mean paying an extra $1,000. Intel, like Samsung and Toshiba, sees steep declines in cost in the next two years. "Price declines are historically 40 percent per year," Winslow said. "And in 2009, a 50 percent reduction, then again in 2010."
Also, like Samsung, Intel sees SSDs playing a role in the server market as a "performance accelerator." Winslow said that Intel recently did a video-on-demand demonstration where it streamed 4,000 videos simultaneously. Just to do the streaming (not to store the video), it took 62 15,000 RPM (very high-performance) hard drives, he said. "We were able to replace those 62 hard drives with 10 SATA (SSD) technology drives," he said.
Finally, Winslow addressed the price collapse in the flash market in general--a topic that generated a lot of press after the Intel analyst meeting on Wednesday. "A majority of flash is being sold in very cyclical consumer electronics devices. Q1 and Q2 are soft quarters," he said. On top of this, suppliers continue to shrink manufacturing process technologies, leading to more capacity at lower cost, he said.
SSD Primer, Part 1: SSDs are based on flash memory chip technology and have no moving parts. Hard-disk drives (HDDs), in contrast, use read-write heads that hover over spinning platters to access and record data. With no moving parts, SSDs avoid both the risk of mechanical failure and the mechanical delays of HDDs. Therefore, SSDs are generally faster and more reliable. The catch is the cost: SSDs are currently much more expensive than HDDs.
SSD Primer, Part 2: Intel will be shipping in the second quarter a Multi-Level Cell or MLC solid-state drive. This is a more sophisticated technology than current Single-Level Cell or SLC. The advantage is larger capacity since MLC uses multiple levels per cell to allow more bits to be stored. The disadvantage is more complexity which can result in lower performance. "Inherently, MLC is slower and inherently fewer write cycling endurance," Winslow said. Intel, however, has technology that will get around these problems, he said.
Intel Flash/SSD capacity: Intel and Micron have a joint venture called IM Flash Technologies. Both companies are currently making flash on a 50-nanometer process with plans to move to 40nm later this year. There are three NAND flash fabrication plants and one more currently being built in Singapore. The Intel-Micron venture provides funding for the development of silicon technology and the capacity to produce that silicon, according to Winslow. But marketing and end-product decisions are "absolutely separate," he said.


http://www.cnet.com/8301-13924_1-988...=2547-1_3-0-20