IBM Power 7 & Watson .. Possibilities Endless

Operating on a single CPU, it could take Watson two hours to answer a single question. A typical Jeopardy! contestant can accomplish this feat in less than three seconds. For Watson to rival the speed of its human competitors in delivering a single, precise answer to a question requires custom algorithms, terabytes of storage and thousands of POWER7 computing cores working in a massively parallel system.

Watch to find out how building smarter systems like Watson involves optimizing hardware and software into a solution greater than the sum of its parts.

An amazing example of parallel computation power, just simply amazing.

©IBM

Particle Accelerator on a Chip

3 February 2011—Forget for a moment about the quest to build bigger high-energy particle accelerators. Last week, at the MEMS 2011 conference, in Cancun, Mexico, researchers instead explained their efforts to create a smaller one.

Their chip-size cyclotron can guide argon ions with around 1.5 kiloelectronvolts of energy down a 5-millimeter accelerating track before whipping them around a 90-degree turn. The system boosts the ions’ energy by 30 electronvolts. That’s not very much energy, but unlike its larger cousins, this accelerator has no need for bulky magnets and instead uses an electric field set up between parallel electrode guide rails to accelerate and steer its particle beam. The device’s designers at Cornell University, in Ithaca, N.Y., say that with more research, similar electrostatic mini-accelerators might be used in shoebox-size scanning electron microscopes or portable particle-ray guns for cancer treatment.

Complete article can be found here.

©IEEE

Intel: Sandy Bridge

Intel launched its 2nd Generation Intel Core Processor family, code named Sandy Bridge, today, the day before the opening of the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show. Sandy Bridge chips are fast—Intel says some 69 percent faster on some benchmarks than the previous generation—and powerful. The new Core processors boast 1.16 billion transistors on a chip, manufactured using 32-nanometer technology. If you were to take the performance boost and apply it to a Boeing 767 aircraft, , the company said, you’d get to your destination twice as fast (not counting check in and security screening, of course).


Complete article here.
©IEEE

Digital Circuits and Boolean Algebra

For people focusing on VLSI, digital logic and boolean algebra is not much too different. While Boolean algebra is a branch of mathematics and is named after its inventor "George Boole", its more realistic application, by utilizing electronic circuit elements like relays etc. was proposed by Claude Shannon, in his exceptional unpublished Masters Thesis (submitted 1937 at the age of 21) and published in 1940 at MIT. How many of us do really look forward to such a challenging work in a MS today? It was just so impressive that I could not resist writing about it and honoring such a great inventor/scientist. Looking back the inventor of digital logic in circuits did it when he was 21, at a point in his career when his creativity was all that he had. Thank you for such a wonderful contribution.


Claude Elwood Shannon (April 30, 1916 – February 24, 2001), is also known as the "Father of Information Theory". Amongst his famous contributions are the following:

• Shannon-Hartley Theorem
• Nyquist-Shannon Sampling Theorem
• Channel Capacity
• Shannon Index
• Shannon's Source Coding Theorem
• Shannon-Fano Coding
• A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits, MS Thesis, MIT

Signing Off,

AD

US Patent for Three Terminal Semiconducting Device: October 1950

We all know that the transistor was a revolutionary invention. Something that has escalated tremendously in the last 5 decades. Its is just amazing to see how it was first made and how it has gone from there on. The intent was to build something magical to translate electrical signals, more simply what we now understand as the common usage of the term 'amplification'.

The Patent Application of the First Three Terminal Semiconductor Device, Bell Labs, 1950

The complete patent may be checked here.

Enjoy Reading !

AD

The Prologue

Over the period of last few years, I have started blogging as a hobby and as a means of holding on to my ideas. Now, I am not much of a daily blogger but have occasional outbursts to blog about every now and then. The two earlier blogs that I havewere started with the intention of educating and sharing knowledge. Unfortunately, they did not turn out as I had planned. This one is the next blog in the unending effort to do so and is very strongly motivated by my keen interest in becoming an educator and my recent crush on the history of semiconductor technology (more specifically microprocessors).

Why is the page link called scientistrulerz.blogspot.com. It isn't without reason as is most of the things I normally do. Back in the old school days, I had a bunch of friends who motivated me to think differently and as the teasing went on they said "Tu to ek din scientist banega". As a young teen, sometimes things just stick on to you. This one most certainly did, maybe not actively but somewhere in my head it did. My first email id was made on a Pentium 1, 120MHz machine that my dad bought for 28,000 Rs. back in the day. We luckily had an internet connection from Dishnet DSL with a speed of 19,600 baud (the old modem kinds). The email id was on yahoo and it was .. as you can guess .. scientistrulerz@yahoo.com. This lasted a while .. till the craze for a new technology sustained. But as most of my friends did not have the same privilege, it went into fading. Over a period yahoo started losing grip over email and gmail started picking up. Early in my college years I had a gmail account as it felt just more comfortable and easy to use. That combine with the theory of disuse led to the eventual fall out of yahoo mail for me. I still have an account for rare connectivity (ashishdembla@yahoo.com) but i rarely do access it. As for Technorama, its just a random G-drive Technology ka Drama, The Display of the Impact of Technology aka Technorama.

The blog is reborn as the ashes of the phoenix rise again to see the light of a new day. I am hoping this rebirth is more symbolic than I imagined it. All I can hope at this moment is that I will try my best to keep the world posted about some cool stuff every now and then.

Will post again very very soon.

Good Bye,
AD