A Boy and His Atom

IBM has released the world’s smallest movie. Company researchers moved thousands of atoms to create a miniature stop-motion movie titled A Boy and His Atom.

A Scene From A Boy and His Atom by IBM Research

The movie, which has 242 frames, was made with a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) which IBM Research has been using to conduct research into data storage. The movie has been certified as the world’s smallest by the Guinness World Records, according to IBM.

The film shows that it’s possible to manipulate single atoms and molecules with the tip of an STM, and IBM scientists had to develop “new low temperature, ultra-stable scanning tunneling microscopic techniques” over many years,” Crommie told TechNewsWorld.

IBM Watson Healthcare

IBM has taken a major step forward with partners Memorial Sloan Kettering and WellPoint in putting IBM Watson to work in healthcare.

On Friday, February 8th, the team unveiled the first commercially-developed Watson-based breakthroughs. These innovations have the potential to help transform the quality and speed of care — and the entire healthcare industry — through individualized evidence-based medicine.

via IBM Watson

Data Distribution Over 100 Gigabit Networks

During the SuperComputing 2012 (SC12) conference November 12-16, an International team of high energy physicists, computer scientists, and network engineers led by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), the University of Victoria, and the University of Michigan, together with Brookhaven National Lab, Vanderbilt and other partners, smashed their previous records for data transfers using the latest generation of wide area network circuits. 

The international team reached a transfer rate of 339 gigabits per second (Gbps)— equivalent to moving four million gigabytes (or one million full length movies) per day, nearly doubling last year's record.

The team also reached a new record for a two-way transfer on a single link by sending data at 187 Gbps between Victoria, Canada, and Salt Lake City.

via SuperComputing 2012

Server Sky | Orbiting Data Centers

Traditional data centers consume almost 3% of US electrical power, and this fraction is growing rapidly. Server arrays in orbit can grow to virtually unlimited computation power, communicate with the whole world, pay for themselves with electricity savings, and greatly reduce pollution and resource usage in the biosphere.

Keith Lofstrom is an electrical engineer who believes that he may have found a long term solution to the data center problem. Lofstrom wants to put huge number of miniature, solar powered servers (called thinsats) in orbit. This concept, known as "server sky", would be facilitated by a low-cost launch system referred to as "Launch Loop". This loop could put many thousands of tons into space at a small fraction of the cost of using rockets.

Server Sky thinsats are ultralight films of glass that convert sunlight into computation and communications. Powered by solar cells, propelled and steered by light pressure, networked and located by microwaves, and cooled by radiation into deep space. Arrays of tens of thousands of thinsats act as highly redundant computation and database servers, as well as phased array antennas to reach thousands of transceivers on the ground.

Server Sky is speculative. The most likely technical showstopper is radiation damage. The most likely practical showstopper is misunderstanding.