Cutting Edge

You've probably heard of or even owned a computer that automatically turns off its hard drive when it senses shock or heavy vibrations. That is an example of sensitive human-machine intimacy. Another example I like is tilting the iPhone to use it as the driving bar for my racing games. Well, that nifty human-to-computer interaction is about to go to whole new level.

HP announced Thursday a new inertial-sensing technology that enables the development of digital micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) accelerometers that are up to 1,000 times more sensitive than those in high-volume products currently available.

A MEMS accelerometer is a sensor that can be used to measure vibration, shock, or change in velocity. When implemented, this allows the device to "feel" the environment it is in.

According to HP, the new sensing technology--the result of HP's 25 years of nano-sensing research--includes multiple detectors as part of a complete sensor network and therefore is capable of real-time data collection, management evaluation, and analysis. This information enables users to make better, faster decisions, and take subsequent action to improve safety, security, and sustainability.

Wal-Mart wants its suppliers to help it get greener.

The retail giant plans to announce on Thursday that it will ask its suppliers to provide environmental information on all products carried in its stores. Wal-Mart Stores will use that information to label each item with an eco rating, designed to measure its environmental friendliness.

"We have to change how we make and sell products," Michael T. Duke, Wal-Mart's president and chief executive, plans to tell about 1,500 suppliers and employees on Thursday at a "sustainability meeting," according to a copy of his prepared remarks, quoted in The New York Times. "We have to make consumption itself smarter and sustainable."

To kick off the program, Wal-Mart will ask its suppliers to answer about 12 questions for each item. The questions are designed to determine how the product was made, how it was packaged, and what elements or ingredients were used to manufacture it.

Wal-Mart will then tap into a database and metrics to calculate the "greenness" of a product and translate that information into a ratings system for consumers.

The company will partner with a consortium of about 12 universities to collect the data and set new design standards. Professor Jay Golden of the Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University will function as co-director of the new consortium.

The universities will work directly with suppliers to determine each product's environmental impact, from how it uses raw materials to if and how it can be recycled.

Talks have already been held in Washington about possible new regulations for environmental labeling. But Golden says having Wal-Mart lead the way will "move it so much faster."

Wal-Mart plans to announce further details about the program on Thursday. But the initiative is clearly important to the company.

The eco-rating system is just the latest effort by Wal-Mart to create a greener landscape. The company has already strived to make its own stores environmentally friendly, including a plan to tap into solar power. Wal-Mart has also driven an effort to create more sustainable electronics devices to reduce the amount of items dumped into landfills.

IBM and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Zurich plan to build a water-cooled supercomputer whose surplus heat will be re-used to heat the university's buildings.

The Aquasar supercomputer will be located at the ETH Zurich facility, and it will start operations next year, the partners said in an announcement on Tuesday.

Water flows along copper pipes in a blade server used in the Aquasar supercomputer.

(Credit: IBM)

The supercomputer will combine two rack-mounted IBM BladeCenter servers, each containing multiple blades with a mixed population of IBM PowerXCell 8i and Intel Nehalem processors. It is expected to deliver a peak performance of about 10 teraflops.

The installation will re-use heat directly for in-building heating. IBM estimates that the wate-rcooling scheme will reduce the system's carbon footprint by up to 85 percent and save up to 30 tons of carbon dioxide annually, compared with standard cooling approaches. The comparison calculations are based on average yearly operation of the system and on in-building heating energy being produced by fossil fuels, the company said.

The energy-consuming refrigeration units used by almost every data center consume about half of the a data center's energy. Aquasar will need no such equipment. As a result, it should reduce overall energy consumption by 40 percent, according to IBM.

"Energy is arguably the number-one challenge humanity will be facing in the 21st century. We cannot afford anymore to design computer systems based on the criterion of computational speed and performance alone," Professor Poulikakos of ETH Zurich, the leader of the Aquasar project, said in a statement. "The new target must be high-performance and low-net power consumption supercomputers and data centers. This means liquid cooling."

The system is the product of an extended joint research project between ETH and IBM scientists, focused on chip-level water-cooling. It also encompasses a concept for "water-cooled data centers with direct energy re-use" proposed by scientists at IBM's Zurich Lab.

Aquasar's use of warm water rather than cold water for cooling is unique and IBM-patented, a spokesman for the company said. Water, which is about 4,000 times more efficient as a coolant than air, will enter the system at 60 degrees C. This will keep the chips in the system at operating temperatures below their maximum of 85 degrees C, according to IBM.

The high input temperature of the coolant results in an even higher-grade heat as an output, which in this case will be about 65 degrees C, the company said.

The system uses jet impingement cooling, which means that water makes direct contact with the back of the chip via micro-channels in the heat sink, according to research papers by the IBM and ETH scientists involved in the Aquasar project. "This method incurs neither the thermal resistance overhead of a base plate, nor the overhead and reliability problem of thermal interface materials, and thus is promising for removing highest-power densities," according to one paper.

Pipelines from the individual blades link to the server rack's water-pipe network, which in turn is connected to the main water transportation network. Aquasar will need about 10 liters of water for cooling, pumped at some 30 liters per minute, IBM said. The cooling system is a closed circuit: the water is heated by the chips and cooled to the required temperature as it passes through a passive heat exchanger, delivering the removed heat directly to the heating system of the university.

Aquasar will be used by the computer science department at ETH Zurich for multiscale flow simulations related to nanotechnology and fluid dynamics. Researchers plan to show that solving scientific problems efficiently can be performed in an energy-efficient manner.

Manek Dubash of ZDNet UK reported from London.

Employees at the Cheetah Conservation Fund's Biomass Energy Project use tech to convert bush into blocks of clean-burning fuel.

(Credit: Biomass Energy Project, Cheetah Conservation Fund)

A group working to save land in Namibia, projects bringing power to Indian villages and building earthquake-resistant homes in Indonesia, the maker of a single-use syringe, and a group that uses technology in classrooms in India were the winners of the Tech Museum awards held Wednesday.

The Biomass Energy Project, Cheetah Conservation Fund in Namibia won the 2008 Intel Environment Award. The group converts invasive bush into clean fuel. It employs 15 people at a biomass processing plant that uses a high-pressure extrusion process to create an economically viable alternative to firewood, coal, and charcoal. The fund is working to recover 25 million acres of land in Namibia and to save endangered cheetahs.

DESI Power: Decentralised Energy Systems India won the 2008 Accenture Economic Development Award. DESI Power is helping more than 100 villages build power plants to areas that lack electricity and is creating jobs with the launch of micro-enterprises. The DESI plants use 19th-century technology--biomass gasification through agricultural waste.

A completely different type of invention took the prize for education. Described as the educational equivalent of Netflix + YouTube + Kazaa, the peer-to-peer file-sharing system Digital Study Hall won the Microsoft Education Award. The Lucknow, India-based project records classroom lessons from experienced teachers on DVDs and distributes them to underprivileged classrooms in India and Bangladesh. Students participating in Digital Study Hall scored nearly 400 times higher on English tests and nearly 300 times higher in math.

The Katherine M. Swanson Equality Award was given to Build Change, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that designs and trains builders and homeowners how to build earthquake-resistant houses in developing countries. The designs use local materials, and are affordable and sustainable, as well as easy to build. In Aceh, Indonesia, alone, Build Change has strengthened 4,200 homes and trained 130 builders. The group also has programs in West Sumatra, Indonesia, and Sichuan, China.

Winning the Fogarty Institute for Innovation Health Award is Marc Koska who developed a syringe that reduces the spread of disease because it can only be used once. The plunger in the K1 "Auto Disable" Syringe developed by Star Syringe locks in place when it is fully depressed, preventing it from being used repeatedly, a common cause of cross-infection among patients in the developing world. The single-use syringes save millions of people from getting infected with Hepatitis B and C and HIV.

For more information about the K1 syringe and four other Tech Awards laureates, read "Tech Museum honors tech that benefits humanity".

Digital Study Hall students benefit from watching lessons on DVD in their underprivileged classrooms in India and Bangladesh.

(Credit: Digital Study Hall)

(Credit: ZDNet Asia )

Microprocessors capable of sniffing out and harnessing energy from the environment could very well be the answer to power scarcity, according to an expert in embedded systems.

Jack Ganssle, chief engineer at The Ganssle Group, has been developing embedded systems since the early 1970s. In the last three decades, he has managed more than 100 embedded products, ranging from deep-sea navigational gears to security systems for the U.S. White House, and sold off three electronic companies.

In Bangalore, India, last week for the Embedded Systems Conference, Ganssle sat down for an interview with ZDNet Asia to discuss the future of embedded systems and the role India can play in growing this industry.

Q: The embedded software industry is said to double every 10 months. How have things changed in the last one year?
Ganssle: Technology is changing all the time. In the last one year, the Apple iPhone has come in at nearly half the price, and it's all due to embedded technology. This has created a big change in the mobile phone market. Similarly, we have seen so many new products like the (iPod) Touch and the various MP3 players coming out in the market. Processors are changing every day.

Also, Microchip (Technology) plans to purchase Atmel. I think this will really reshape the industry. When most people think of embedded technology, they think of really fancy, high-end processors. Both Atmel and Microchip target the low-end market, and that's where the volume is. There are 9 billion processors sold every year, and most of these are low-cost.

What role can India play in the growth of this market?
Ganssle: India is a gigantic market. As a country develops and gets wealthy, the demand for electronics will grow.

India is creating its own embedded systems industry due to the availability of highly skilled engineering talent. I think India and China are going to be the engines of growth for this industry due to the strength of their domestic market.

Will the energy industry see a lot of development in embedded systems?
Ganssle: Absolutely. Power is scarce in a country like India, but people want their mobile devices such as mobile phone, MP3 players, and cameras, to run forever. To address this, there is a technology called energy scavenging, where the microprocessors steal energy from the environment. Energy scavenging harnesses any energy that is available in the environment. It could be anything ranging from energy radiated by power lines, heat in the coffee cup or the human body. There is a lot of research being done in this field.

In Japan, tips at a bar go down if your glass is allowed to be less than half-empty. I learned that in Japan, beer glasses come with embedded systems. So each time the beer goes down, the glass radios the bartender for a refill. In concepts like these, energy scavenging makes a lot of sense. The beer is cold and the environment is warm; so you can use the temperature difference to power the embedded system.

Energy scavenging is going to be the next big thing. We are tired of recharging our batteries. In the future, we are going to see less and less of that.

In the supply chain industry, are there any breakthroughs that can make a difference to technologies like RFID (radio frequency identification)?
Ganssle: The problem with RFID is that it still costs too much. For the price to go down, volumes will have to go up. One thing that India might be good at is exploiting technologies like IC (integrated circuits) fabrication to generate extremely low-cost RFID components. This will solve gigantic problems.

If everything had an RFID chip on it, you could go to any grocery story, fill up your cart, and just walk out the front door. As you walk out, each of those packages with an RFID chip will tell the RFID reader installed at the door what you bought. It then scans your wallet and gets your bank or credit card information, and debits the charges from your bank account. For grocery stores, it saves a lot of money since they don't need to hire people to man checkout counters.

So what does the future look like?
Ganssle: In the next five to 10 years, we will see thousands of microprocessors that sense virtually everything. We'll see microprocessors in desks, in beer mugs, clothes, and probably many other products that we never imagined.

The costs of embedded systems need to go down a lot further, and when that happens, it will become cost-effective to build smart sensors. You could just spread tens of thousands of small sensors that cost less than (2 cents). These could be used for some sort of mesh networking.

Mesh networking forms ad hoc networks with all the "smart dust," where the signals move from one dust particle to another, and back to a server somewhere. (Smart dust describes a network of wireless-enabled microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) sensors or devices that are used to detect temperature, light or movement.) When sensors cost next to nothing, you can monitor everything. For instance, you can monitor global warming by dumping smart dust on an airplane. It can stay suspended in the aircraft for months and return data back to a central science laboratory.

And in your home, for example, you won't need a security system. Just spread the smart dust around and if somebody enters and his data doesn't match the preapproved identities, an alarm will be triggered.

Swati Prasad reported from India for ZDNet Asia.