The Rise Of Parallelism


Parallel computing is an idea whose time has finally come, but not for the obvious reasons. Parallelism is a computer science concept that is older Moore's Law. In fact, it first appeared in print in a 1958 IBM research memo, in which John Cocke, a mathematician, and Daniel Slotnick, a computer scientist, discussed parallelism in numerical calculations. That was followed eight years later by... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Chipmakers Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has purchased a brain-inspired supercomputing platform for deep learning developed by IBM Research. LLNL will receive a 16-chip TrueNorth system from IBM. A single TrueNorth processor from IBM consists of 5.4 billion transistors wired together to create an array of 1 million digital neurons. The chip is fabricated based on a 28nm LPP pro... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: March 29


Brain-inspired computing Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has purchased a brain-inspired supercomputing platform for deep learning developed by IBM Research. Based on a neurosynaptic computer chip called IBM TrueNorth, the scalable platform will process the equivalent of 16 million neurons and 4 billion synapses. It will consume the energy equivalent of a tablet computer. ... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Nov. 10


Singing to your storage Existing research on 'racetrack memory', which uses tiny magnetic wires, each one hundreds of times thinner than a human hair, down which magnetic bits of data run like racing cars around a track, has focused on using either magnetic fields or electric currents to move the data bits down the wires. However, both these options create heat and reduce power efficiency. ... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: April 28


Printing graphene aerogels Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researchers have made graphene aerogel microlattices with an engineered architecture via a 3D printing technique known as direct ink writing, potentially leading to better energy storage, sensors, and nanoelectronics. Aerogel is a synthetic porous, ultralight material derived from a gel, in which the liquid component of the... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Sept. 3


Flexible, organic solar cells Work by a team of chemical engineers at Penn State and Rice University may lead to a new class of inexpensive organic solar cells. If solar cells could be made as easily as posters or newspapers are printed, sheets of organic solar cells could be made, representing a fundamental shift in the way solar cells are made, the researchers said. Today, most solar c... » read more

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