Let A Quick Scan Make Your Computer Easier

We all know how anti-virus scanners have made protecting your computer pretty much a hands-off proposition. The software performs its own scan, makes repairs, even updates itself.

What if a quick automatic scan could help make handling another computer chore just as easy. I'm talking about keeping your Computer Drivers updated. You know drivers -- those little bits of software, like Sound Drivers and Video Drivers -- that control all the key parts of your PC or laptop. If you don't have exactly the right driver software, and if its not up-to-date, you'll find your computer silent, unable to print, or worse.

You can spend all night hunting for the CDs that came with your computer, or all day prowling the Web looking for the driver you need. If those searches come up empty, well, then what?

Or skip all that, and automate your driver systems through a quick scan that updates a variety of drivers so you never find your computer half dead ever again. Click on the links above to learn more.

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A Nimbus Rises In World of Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is a hot topic in the technology world these days. Even if you're not a tech-phile, chances are if you've watched a lot of television or skimmed a business magazine, you've heard someone talking about cloud computing as the way of the future. While it's difficult to predict the future, a cloud computing infrastructure project developed at Argonne National Laboratory, called Nimbus, is demonstrating that cloud computing's potential is being realized now.

So what exactly is cloud computing? There are varying definitions, but cloud computing is essentially a form of distributed computing that allows users the ability to tap into a vast network of computing resources through the Internet to complete their work. If, for example, someone wanted to analyze traffic patterns on the nation's highways, they could upload and store their data into the 'cloud' and have multiple computers crunch the data and then present the results back to them in a unified way as if the work were completed by one giant machine.

Why the word 'cloud'? Some sources believe the term originated in 20th Century telephone systems. Kate Keahey, the lead on the Nimbus project at Argonne, believes the phrase was created when researchers were trying to visualize this type of computing on a whiteboard and made a circular set of squiggles to represent the many components in the internet that would do the computational work. Since these drawings looked liked clouds, Keahey says, researchers soon started saying that data would go 'up to the cloud' for processing.

If all of this sounds familiar, you may have heard this concept before, according to Keahey. Previous decades brought us something called grid computing, which was another type of distributed computing that allowed users to tap into computing resources through a network to get their computational jobs done. But Keahey argues that cloud computing is an evolution of grid computing, with some important differences. With grid computing, you submit what you want computed to a batch scheduler, which puts your job in a queue for a specific set of computing resources, for example a supercomputer, to work on.

"This means you have no control over when your job might execute," Keahey says. You may have to wait as long as a few days before your job is called up, and you're pretty much at the mercy of how that particular grid asset is set up. If its configuration doesn't quite match the complexities of your job, fixing the problem may get very complicated.

Cloud computing, on the other hand, can greatly mitigate this one-size-must-fit-all approach to distributed computing. Many cloud computing platforms allow users to know ahead of time how much computing capacity is available from the cloud, so the work can be done faster. Users can also configure a 'virtual machine' that exists within the cloud to meet the particulars of the jobs they are trying to accomplish. Once a user has configured the type of virtual machine they need for their work, they can go to different cloud computing providers and recreate the system they need to get their jobs done, making computation power a commodity.

Nimbus is an example of such an adaptable system. Keahey and her team developed this open source cloud computing infrastructure to allow scientists working on data-intensive research projects to be able to use such virtual machines with a cloud provider. Nimbus also allows users to create multiple virtual machines to complete specific computational jobs that can be deployed throughout the cloud and still work in tandem with each other. This flexibility allows a user to configure a virtual machine and then connect it to resources on a cloud, regardless of who is providing the cloud.

Having this kind of flexibility and on-demand computing power is vital to projects that are extremely data-intensive, such as research efforts in experimental and theoretical physics. Nimbus has already been deployed successfully to support the STAR nuclear physics experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory's Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider. When researchers there needed to turn the massive amounts of data they had generated into viable simulations for an international conference, they used Nimbus to create virtual machines that were run through commercial cloud computing providers.

Creating the virtual machines was relatively easy. "With Nimbus, a virtual cluster can be online in minutes," Keahey says, and the computing cloud they tapped into provided the computational power they needed to get the simulations done on time. Keahey and her team are now collaborating with CERN in Europe to process the data generated by physics experiments being done there.

Keahey and others in the field believe that this use of custom-crafted virtual machines there are relatively easy to configure on computing clouds will handle more and more of the heavy computational lifting in the future.

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'Sleep Talking' PCs Save Energy, Money

Personal computers may soon save large amounts of energy by "sleep talking." Computer scientists at the University of California San Diego and Microsoft Research have created a plug-and-play hardware prototype for personal computers that induces a new energy saving state known as "sleep talking."

Normally PCs can be in either awake mode—where they consume power even if they are not being used, or in a low power sleep mode—where they save substantial power but are essentially inactive and unresponsive to network traffic. The new sleep talking state provides much of the energy savings of sleep mode and some of the network-and-Internet-connected convenience of awake mode.

UC San Diego computer science Ph.D. student Yuvraj Agarwal presented this work on April 23, 2009 at the USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 2009). Computer scientists at UC San Diego and Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington and Cambridge, UK collaborated on this project and the NSDI 2009 paper, "Somniloquy: Augmenting Network Interfaces to Reduce PC Energy Usage."

"Large numbers of people keep their PCs in awake mode even though the PCs are relatively idle for long blocks of time because they want to stay connected to an internal network or the Internet or both," says Agarwal. "I realized that most of the tasks that people keep their computers on for—like ensuring remote access and availability for virus scans and backup, maintaining presence on instant messaging (IM) networks, being available for incoming voice-over-IP (VoIP) calls, and file sharing and downloading—can be achieved at much lower power-use levels than regular awake mode."

Following this realization, the team built a small USB-connected hardware and software plug-in system that allows a PC to remain in sleep mode while continuing to maintain network presence and run well-defined application functions. It supports instant messaging applications, VoIP, large background web downloads, peer-to-peer file sharing networks such as BitTorrent, and remote access. The computer scientists say their system is easily extensible to support other applications.

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'Rochester Cube' Points Way to More Powerful Chip Designs

The next major advance in computer processors will likely be the move from today's two-dimensional chips to three-dimensional circuits, and the first three-dimensional synchronization circuitry is now running at 1.4 gigahertz at the University of Rochester.

Unlike past attempts at 3-D chips, the Rochester chip is not simply a number of regular processors stacked on top of one another. It was designed and built specifically to optimize all key processing functions vertically, through multiple layers of processors, the same way ordinary chips optimize functions horizontally. The design means tasks such as synchronicity, power distribution, and long-distance signaling are all fully functioning in three dimensions for the first time.

"I call it a cube now, because it's not just a chip anymore," says Eby Friedman, distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rochester and faculty director of the pro of the processor. "This is the way computing is going to have to be done in the future. When the chips are flush against each other, they can do things you could never do with a regular 2D chip."
Friedman, working with engineering student Vasilis Pavlidis, says that many in the integrated circuit industry are talking about the limits of miniaturization, a point at which it will be impossible to pack more chips next to each other and thus limit the capabilities of future processors'. He says a number of integrated circuit designers anticipate someday expanding into the third dimension, stacking transistors on top of each other.

But with vertical expansion will come a host of difficulties, and Friedman says the key is to design a 3-D chip where all the layers interact like a single system. Friedman says getting all three levels of the 3-D chip to act in harmony is like trying to devise a traffic control system for the entire United States—and then layering two more United States above the first and somehow getting every bit of traffic from any point on any level to its destination on any other level—while simultaneously coordinating the traffic of millions of other drivers.

Complicate that by changing the two United States layers to something like China and India where the driving laws and roads are quite different, and the complexity and challenge of designing a single control system to work in any chip begins to become apparent, says Friedman.
Since each layer could be a different processor with a different function, such as converting MP3 files to audio or detecting light for a digital camera, Friedman says that the 3-D chip is essentially an entire circuit board folded up into a tiny package. He says the chips inside something like an iPod could be compacted to a tenth their current size with ten times the speed.

What makes it all possible is the architecture Friedman and his students designed, which uses many of the tricks of regular processors, but also accounts for different impedances that might occur from chip to chip, different operating speeds, and different power requirements. The fabrication of the chip is unique as well. Manufactured at MIT, the chip must have millions of holes drilled into the insulation that separates the layers in order to allow for the myriad vertical connections between transistors in different layers.

"Are we going to hit a point where we can't scale integrated circuits any smaller? Horizontally, yes," says Friedman. "But we're going to start scaling vertically, and that will never end. At least not in my lifetime. Talk to my grandchildren about that."

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U.S., Chinese Scientists Meet For Computer Summit

Approximately 15 professors, deans and other professionals in the computing sciences from the People's Republic of China came to Arlington, Va., just outside Washington last month for a summit with their U.S. counterparts. The one-day meeting gave participants the chance to discuss challenges and opportunities facing computing scholars from both sides of the Pacific, and it reflected the growing level of cooperation between the academic research communities in both countries.

The event was organized by the DIMACS Center at Rutgers University and was sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF), which also hosted the event. Several NSF leaders, including NSF Director Arden Bement, had an opportunity to speak to summit participants and listen in on the event. The Chinese delegation was led by Jiaquang Sun, the vice director of the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and included leaders from several of China's leading research universities.

China is rapidly becoming a world leader in information technology research and development, and many of the country's research universities rival their western counterparts in developing new patents and other innovations. While some may perceive China's growth in the field as a threat to the U.S. economy, others argue that fostering stronger ties between researchers in both countries can be mutually beneficial.

"Science and technology have always been a powerful force for social and economic progress and for international diplomacy," Bement said in his opening remarks at the summit. "At no time has that been more true than today."

In addition to sponsoring the summit, Bement adds, NSF has opened an office in Beijing to create more opportunities for collaborations between scientists and researchers from both countries. The opening of that office was the catalyst for the first such U.S.-China Computer Science Leadership Summit.

Participants heard presentations on common issues facing computer scientists in both countries, including evaluating faculty members, recruiting and training graduate students, and hot research topics.

According to Fred Roberts, the DIMACS Center's director, one topic that generated an animated discussion was the increasingly multidisciplinary nature of modern science and the growing connections between computer science and other disciplines such as biology and the social sciences. Another topic of mutual interest involved the role of computer science in solving some of the challenges facing the human race, including energy shortages, climate change, health care and responding to natural disasters.

"There was great enthusiasm on both sides to continue this dialogue in the future," Roberts says.

The event also gave participants from both sides an opportunity to discuss their own research with each other and make connections for future collaborations. Leaders from both delegations expressed their interest in continuing these summits in the future.

"I think the summits for exchanges between scientists in China and the U.S. are helpful," says Sun. "I will push the summit actively."

This year's summit grew out of a similar event held at Beihang University in China. In May 2006, deans and directors of major universities in the U.S. visited China to establish a dialogue between leaders of major computer science departments in both countries and to allow U.S. scholars an opportunity to gain insight into current and future trends in China's information technology research activities.

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Future Of Computing -- Carbon Nanotubes, Superconductors to Replace Silicon Chip

The silicon chip, which has supplied several decades’ worth of remarkable increases in computing power and speed, looks unlikely to be capable of sustaining this pace for more than another decade – in fact, in a plenary talk at the the Institute of Physics’ Condensed Matter and Materials Physics conference, Suman Datta of Pennsylvania State University, gives the conventional silicon chip no longer than four years left to run.

As silicon computer circuitry gets ever smaller in the quest to pack more components into smaller areas on a chip, eventually the miniaturized electronic devices are undermined by fundamental physical limits. They start to become leaky, making them incapable of holding onto digital information. So if the steady increases in computing capability that we have come to take for granted are to continue, some new technology will have to take over from silicon.

Replacing the chip with carbon nanotubes

At the conference, researchers at Leeds University in the UK will report an important step towards one prospective replacement. Carbon nanotubes, discovered in 1991, are tubes of pure carbon just a few nanometres wide – about the width of a typical protein molecule, and tens of thousands of times thinner than a human hair. Because they conduct electricity, they have been proposed as ready-made molecular-scale wires for making electronic circuitry.

Some nanotubes behave as semiconductors, like silicon; others carry electric currents like metal wires. Already, fundamental elements of computer circuits such as transistors have been made from individual carbon nanotubes.

But the problem is arranging nanotubes into circuit patterns. One particular difficulty is that they are typically made as mixtures of metallic and semiconducting tubes, whereas just one type or the other is needed for a specific component. These electrical properties depend on the precise arrangement of carbon atoms in the nanotube, but that’s hard to determine for single tubes.

Bryan Hickey and his coworkers at Leeds have now developed a technique that will reveal an individual nanotube’s structure (and thus its electrical properties), and then allow it to be placed in a position on a surface with an accuracy of about 100 nanometres, a fraction of the width of a human blood cell. The nanotubes are grown on a perforated ceramic grid, and tubes lying across the holes are examined in an electron microscope to deduce their atomic structures. Then the researchers use two needle-fine tips like tweezers to pick up a single tube under the microscope and put back down on another surface.

Chris Allen, one of the Leeds teams, says, “With this technique we can make carbon nanotube devices of a complexity that is not achievable by most other means.”

Boosting computer power with superconductors

Two further talks at the meeting will describe an even more dramatic way to overcome the limitations of silicon computers. Hans Mooij of the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and Raymond Simmons of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, USA, will claim that superconductors – materials that conduct electricity with zero electrical resistance – can harness the power of quantum physics to boost computer power tremendously.

So-called quantum computers have become one of the hottest items in physics over the past decade. They attempt to improve on the power of silicon not by making components smaller but by exploiting the counterintuitive principles of quantum mechanics, the theory generally used to understand how objects behave at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles.

Objects governed by quantum theory can be in several different states at once, like a light switch being simultaneously ‘on’ and ‘off’. These ‘superposition’ states don’t correspond to anything familiar from our everyday world, but countless experiments have proved that they can exist so long as the quantum objects are not disturbed by, for example, making a measurement on them.
In a quantum computer, the equivalent of ‘bits’ that hold binary information as 1’s and 0’s in today’s computers will be quantum bits or qubits, which can also exist as superpositions of 1’s and 0’s. This massively increases the amount of information that can be encoded in a quantum computer’s memory. The catch is that superpositions are extremely delicate and hard to maintain, especially in memories containing large numbers of qubits that interact with one another.

Various candidates for making qubits are being explored, such as magnetically trapped atoms or nanometre-scale blobs of semiconductors. But it has long been recognized that loops of superconducting material can also be placed in quantum superposition states, and thus act as qubits. Here the quantum states may correspond to an electric current circulating round the ring in one direction or the other. (In superconductors this circulation can continue more or less indefinitely without petering out, because there is no electrical resistance.)

At the conference, Simmonds will describe the first demonstration of information being transmitted between two such superconducting qubits. This shows that elements of this kind can act as a quantum-computing memory and a “bus” for qubits to communicate with one another, an essential requirement of any working computer.

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SETI@home Ramps Up to Analyze More Data in Search of Extraterrestrial Intelligence

The longest-running search for radio signals from alien civilizations is getting a burst of new data from an upgraded Arecibo telescope, which means the SETI@home project needs more desktop computers to help crunch the data.

Since SETI@home launched eight years ago, the project based at the University of California, Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory has signed up more than 5 million interested volunteers and boasts the largest community of dedicated users of any Internet computing project: 170,000 devotees on 320,000 computers.

Yet, new and more sensitive receivers on the world's largest radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, and better frequency coverage are generating 500 times more data for the project than before. The SETI@home software has been upgraded to deal with this new data as the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) enters a new era and offers a new opportunity for those who want to help find other civilizations in the universe.

"The next generation SETI@home is 500 times more powerful then anything anyone has done before," says project chief scientist Dan Werthimer. "That means we are 500 times more likely to find ET than with the original SETI@home."

According to project scientist Eric Korpela, the new data amounts to 300 gigabytes per day, or 100 terabytes (100,000 gigabytes) per year, about the amount of data stored in the U.S. Library of Congress. "That's why we need all the volunteers," he says. "Everyone has a chance to be part of the largest public participation science project in history."

The 1,000-foot diameter Arecibo dish, which fills a valley in Puerto Rico, is part of the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center operated by Cornell University with funds from the National Science Foundation. Since 1992, Werthimer and his team have piggybacked on radio astronomy observations at Arecibo to record signals from space and analyze them for patterns that could indicate they were transmitted by an intelligent civilization.

When the team's incoming data overwhelmed its ability to analyze it, the scientists conceived a distributed computing project to harness many computers into one big supercomputer to do the analysis. Since SETI@home was launched, other distributed computing projects have arisen, from folding@home to predict the three-dimensional tangle of a protein to the newly-launched cosmology@home to model possible universes. Most are now on a platform called BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing), which was developed by SETI@home's director David Anderson so that the various projects could share resources.

"There are now 42 projects on BOINC, and, until now, there has been enough computing power to go around," Werthimer says.

What triggered the new flow of data was the addition of seven new receivers at Arecibo, which now allow the telescope to record radio signals from seven regions of the sky simultaneously instead of just one. With greater sensitivity and the ability to detect the polarization of the radio signals, plus 40 times more frequency coverage, Arecibo is set to survey the sky for new radio sources.

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R.I. Physicists Use Big Computers To Gain Knowledge of Particles

What if, before designing a car, an engineer could use physical knowledge of atomic particles to design materials and know exactly how they would react in a collision? What if fundamental physical equations that predict how those particles will behave in various energy states (cold, heat, stress) could be used to design spacecraft? To solve the physics equations that will lead to the engineering designs of tomorrow, physicists at the University of Rhode Island are investigating the fundamental quantum mechanics of particles using computers from SGI.

The SGI Altix system, installed in August, is used by the Physics Department to solve one of the basic equations of quantum mechanics, the Schrodinger equation,which describes how matter behaves at the atomic scale. While the equationhas been solved in several simple cases, SGI Altix technology was chosen because systems involving more than two or three particles cannot bedirectly solved, and require instead the use of computationally intensive numerical methods.

"We selected the Altix because of the speed of the connectivity of the various nodes, the speed of the exchange of information between the nodes,the speed of the individual processors, and the flexibility that that offers," says Peter Nightingale, professor of physics, University ofRhode Island. "That is important because a lot of what we do involves linear algebra with matrices, and the matrices tend to be spread out over different nodes. There is communication necessary to do a coordinated calculation for a matrix that is spread out over these systems. It's the speed of that communication that really is a bottleneck at times. Our cluster system was simply becoming unreliable and the SGI Altix offers muchstronger connectivity and therefore we are able to do bigger calculations faster, which require a lot of compute power."

Purchased in July through James River Technical, Inc. (JRTI), SGI's exclusive higher education reseller, the SGI Altix 350, with 10Intel Itanium 2 processors running Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9, is connected to the older cluster as well as to numerous desktops in the Physics Department. The SGI Altix system is also connected to the Internet, allowing anyone with access to use it, typically students who log in from home.

The SGI Altix 350 system will be used by Nightingale and his students as part of an ongoing program, supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), to study the behavior of small van der Waals complexes and to develop their own applications. These van der Waals systems consist of a small number of weakly interacting atoms, and the research addresses the fundamental problem of solving the Schrodinger equation for these systems. The University of Rhode Island researchers will develop new Monte Carlo methods to solve this equation, and the SGI Altix system will supply the power to speed up study of these particle systems and compare them with experiments.

As Nightingale explains, the development of these methodsalso has implications for future engineering design.

"The energies of ground and excited states tell us about how the particles interact with each other, but what is not really known is how complicated systems interact, what the strength of the interaction is, as the distance changes," adds Nightingale. "For instance, if you can accurately predict where the energy levels are, you can figure out what the interactions between the particles are and that is important for all sorts of applications. Ultimately, and we may not be there for quite a while, the idea is to write down these fundamental physical equations and then designmaterials on the basis of the fundamental properties of this material. Right now, engineers design products based on what are called phenomenological models, which are a mixture of things that are known, things that are guessed, and things that are measured. But it would be much more elegant if you could start from fundamental physics, from the Schrodinger equation, and on the basis of that predict how your car will behave in a collision, for example. That's quite a stretch, but that's the ultimate goal."



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