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IBM will release a radical new chip next year that will go into a University of Illinois supercomputer in a quest to build what may become the world's fastest supercomputer.

That university's supercomputer center is a storied place, home to both famous fictional and real supercomputers. The notorious HAL 9000 sentient supercomputer in "2001: A Space Odyssey" was built in Urbana, Illinois, presumably on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus.

Though not aspiring to artificial intelligence, the IBM Blue Waters project supercomputer, like the HAL 9000 series, will be able to do massively complex calculations in an instant and, like HAL, be built in Urbana-Champaign. It is being housed in a special building on the Urbana-Champaign campus specifically for the computer that will theoretically be capable of achieving 10 petaflops, about 10 times as fast as the fastest supercomputer today. (A petaflop is 1 quadrillion floating point operations per second, a key indicator of supercomputer performance.)

Part of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois, it will be the largest publicly accessible supercomputer in the world when it's turned on sometime in 2011.

Supercomputers are essentially a large collection of microprocessors acting in concert on a complex problem. As processor designs go, the upcoming Blue Waters' IBM Power7 processor--due in the first half of 2010--is a big step for IBM: the processor integrates the features of a chip used in its "Roadrunner" supercomputer, which has often been ranked as the fastest supercomputer in the world. Power7 fuses the flagship Power chip design with key technology from a separate "Cell" processor--the latter was part of IBM's Roadrunner system at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, according to Bradley McCredie, an IBM Fellow in the Systems and Technology Group.

"We took some of that genetic material from the Cell program--ways to do floating point (calculations)--and embedded that right into the Power7 core," McCredie said in an interview with CNET.

But that's not the only thing that makes the Power7 chip special. It integrates eight processing cores in one chip package and each core can execute four tasks--called "threads"--turning an individual chip into a virtual 32-core processor. As a yardstick, Intel's high-end Xeon processors typically have two threads per processing core.

IBM is also using novel memory technology. Widely used "static" RAM memory, used as the on-chip memory in almost all processors today, can add as much as a billion transistors to high-end processors. IBM wanted to avoid these ballooning--and costly--chip counts and elected to use a technology called E-DRAM, keeping the total number of transistors to 1.2 billion. "The equivalent number of transistors if we had done all of the cache in (static RAM) is well in excess of two billion," McCredie said.

And the chip's speed? Between… Read more

Unique's 3D Salt Water Fish Tank is an attractive screen saver that transforms your computer into a burbling aquarium. Some aspects could be better, but it's soothing and not a bad simulation overall.

The screen saver's graphics aren't going to fool anyone into thinking that they're seeing real fish, but on the whole, they're pretty high quality, with smooth and realistic movement. We like that you can customize the look of the aquarium to some extent, such as setting the tank lighting for high noon, dusk, or night. You can also adjust the tint … Read more

Norway opened on Tuesday the world's first osmotic power plant, which produces emissions-free electricity by mixing fresh water and sea water through a special membrane.

State-owned utility Statkraft's prototype plant, which for now will produce a tiny 2 kilowatts to 4 kilowatts of power or enough to run a coffee machine, will enable Statkraft to test and develop the technology needed to drive down production costs.

The plant is driven by osmosis that naturally draws fresh water across a membrane and toward the seawater side. This creates higher pressure on the sea water side, driving a turbine and … Read more

Making a bigger splash than expected, the crash of an empty rocket stage in a permanently shadowed crater near the moon's south pole last month kicked up a surprising amount of water ice and vapor, confirming the presence of a potentially valuable resource for future space travelers.

"I'm here today to tell you that indeed, yes, we found water," said Anthony Colaprete, the project scientist and principal investigator for the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite. "And we didn't find just a little bit, we found a significant amount."

Holding up water jugs to make the point, he said "if you remember, a month ago we were talking about teaspoons going into glasses over football fields. Well, now I can say today that in the 20- to 30-meter (65- to 100-foot-wide) crater LCROSS made, we found maybe about a dozen of these two-gallon buckets worth of water."

And more than water. Data from the LCROSS instruments show signs of other compounds that may shed light on the moon's evolution.

"It's a whole lot more beyond the water," Colaprete said. "That's the exciting part in my mind, it's not only about the water now. There's actually a lot more here that we're going to be talking about in the months ahead, looking at the LCROSS data."

Said Greg Delory, a researcher at the University of California at Berkeley: "This is not your father's moon. Rather than a dead and unchanging world, it could in fact be a very dynamic and interesting one that could tell us unique things about the Earth-moon system and the early solar system."… Read more

Your friends call you a klutz, Mom calls you careless, and you beat yourself up every time you drop your phone in the toilet or step on your MP3 player. We can't help you with your overall clumsiness, but there may be a solution for your soaked devices.

The Bheestie Bag is a small, lightweight pouch that draws moisture out of personal electronics using small, liquid-absorbing beads. After the device has been soaked or spilled upon, take the battery out, dry the device, and place it in the bag for 24 to 72 hours. The beads absorb water in … Read more

Run Car on Water offers an intriguing solution to rising gasoline prices. This e-book describes a step-by-step process for converting your automobile's engine to run on water.

The program's interface is simple. While there's no Help file, none is needed because this is an electronic book read in Adobe Acrobat. The e-book covers the history, techniques, and possible pitfalls of converting one's car to run on water. Chapters are written in a very plainspoken tone that is, thankfully, free of jargon and confusing terms. One complaint we had was that it takes a scant 26 pages … Read more

Green Earth Technologies (GET) announced Wednesday that its environmentally friendly motor oil for cars will soon be available on shelves across the U.S.

The manufacturer of the biodegradable, carbon neutral motor oil made in part from the animal fat of beef slaughter byproducts has been waiting on certification from the American Petroleum Institute before selling its G-Oil to the public.

G-Oil has received API starburst certification, a symbol put on a product's packaging to signify it meets specific standards and is recommended for use by leading vehicle manufacturers. GET's car oil was additionally granted the API service … Read more

You're approaching the kitchen sink with raw meat all over your hands. Now what? You contort your hands around to turn on the water without making a mess, or you make a mess and then spend an extra five minutes sanitizing the faucet. Or, you take advantage of Delta Faucet's new Touch2O technology and touch the faucet with your wrist, forearm, or elbow to start and stop the flow of water.

Use the handle as you would any ordinary faucet, or open the faucet and then start and stop the flow of water with a simple touch to … Read more

I like water; I like it a lot. When offered the choice between Coke or Pepsi, I usually just say water. When right, it's crisp and clean and truly refreshing. A lot of people must feel the same as I do; the amount of easily accessible home water filters is evidence enough of that. And it should be that way; it is the stuff we are made of, after all.

I jumped at the chance when presented with the opportunity to test out the Zuvo Water Purator. It can be installed either above or below the counter, and I … Read more