IBM Research and five universities are partnering to create computing systems that are expected to simulate and emulate the brain’s abilities for sensation, perception, action, interaction and cognition while rivalling its low power consumption and compact size.

The digital data explosion shows no signs of slowing down - according to analyst firm IDC, the amount of digital data is growing at a mind-boggling 60 percent each year, giving businesses access to incredible new streams of information.  But without the ability to monitor, analyse and react to this information in real-time, the majority of its value may be lost. Until the data is captured and analysed, decisions or actions may be delayed. Cognitive computing offers the promise of systems that can integrate and analyze vast amounts of data from many sources in the blink of an eye, allowing businesses or individuals to make rapid decisions in time to have a significant impact.

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In response to ever increasing demands for smaller, more powerful and energy-efficient devices for cloud computing and high-performance servers, IBM has announced the semiconductor industry’s first computationally based process for production of next generation 22nm semiconductors. Computational Scaling (CS) is a process that enables the production of complex, powerful and energy-efficient semiconductors at 22nms and beyond.

Most integrated circuits are manufactured at 45nm or larger technology nodes. Producing circuits at 22nm is a challenging milestone since current lithography methods - the process of designing photomasks to image circuit patterns on silicon wafers in mass quantity - are not adequate for critical layers at 22nm due to fundamental physical limitations.

Computational Scaling overcomes these limitations by using mathematical techniques to modify the shape of the masks and characteristics of the illuminating source at each layer of an integrated circuit.

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Engineers and researchers at the IBM Hursley development lab in England and Almaden Research Center in California have set a record in storage speed, outperforming the current rate by more than 250 percent. By combining Flash solid-state technology and IBM’s storage virtualization technology, the researchers were able to transfer data at more than 1 million Input/Output (I/O) per second.

The results have profound implications, especially for businesses that rely on computational speed such as reservation systems and financial trading systems. Solid state storage is faster than traditional disk drives because it uses no moving parts. It also requires less floor space and energy. But experts say achieving gains will need more than new hardware.

The results were achieved using Flash solid-state technology coupled with IBM’s industry leading, highly scalable storage virtualization technology. Under the codename “Project Quicksilver,” IBM achieved groundbreaking results in transferring data at a sustained rate of over one million Input/Output (I/O) per second — with a response time of under one millisecond (ms). Compared to the fastest industry benchmarked disk system Quicksilver improved performance by 250 percent at less than 1/20th the response time, took up 1/5th the floor space and required only 55 percent of the power and cooling.

Performance improvements of this magnitude can have profound implications for business, allowing 2-3 times the work to complete in a given timeframe for classic workloads, enabling tremendous efficiency for time sensitive applications like reservations systems, and financial program trading systems, and creating opportunity for entirely new insights in information warehouses and analytic solutions.

IBM and its joint development partners, AMD, Freescale, STMicroelectronics, Toshiba and the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (CNSE), have produced the first working static random access memory (SRAM) for the 22 nanometer (nm) technology node - the world’s first reported working cell built at its 300mm research facility in Albany, New York.

SRAM chips are precursors to more complex devices such as microprocessors. The SRAM cell utilises a conventional six-transistor design and has an area of 0.1um2, breaking the previous SRAM scaling barriers.

Dr TC Chen, vice president of Science and Technology, IBM Research, explained: “We are working at the ultimate edge of what is possible - progressing toward advanced, next-generation semiconductor technologies. This new development is a critical achievement in the pursuit to continually drive miniaturisation in microelectronics.”

22 nm is two generations away in chip manufacturing. The next generation is 32 nm — where IBM and its partners are in development with their 32 nm high-K metal gate technology.

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A research project designed to help doctors detect subtle changes in the condition of critically ill premature babies has been launched by IBM and the University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT).

A group of researchers will use advanced stream computing software developed by IBM Research to work towards enhancing the decision making capabilities of doctors. The software ingests a constant stream of biological data such as heart rate and respiration, along with environmental data gathered from advanced sensors and more traditional monitoring equipment on or around the babies.

The type of information that will come out of the research project is not available today. Currently physicians monitoring ‘preemies’ rely on a paper-based process that involves manually looking at the readings from various monitors and getting feedback from the nurses providing care.

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To help people remember key facts, IBM has unveiled a software technology that uses the images, sounds, and text recorded on everyday mobile devices to help people recall names, faces, conversations and other important information.

The technology uses associative recall to make connections between pieces of related data acquired by a person. The advantage of the new technology is its ability to understand the context in which data is captured, then connect various data, and then use this knowledge to help bring the correct information to a person when it is needed.

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Using an IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer, scientists at ETH Zurich and the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory have demonstrated an extensive simulation of real human bone structures, providing doctors with a ‘high-definition’ view of fragility or strength of bones they never had before. This could lead to better clinical tools to improve the diagnosis and treatment of the bone disease osteoporosis.

Today, osteoporosis is diagnosed by measuring bone mass and density using specialised x-ray or computer tomography techniques. Studies have shown however, that bone mass measurements are only a moderately accurate way to determine the strength of the bone because bones are not solid structures.

Aiming for an accurate, powerful and fast method to automate the analysis of bone strength, scientists at the Departments of Mechanical and Process Engineering and Computer Science at ETH Zurich teamed up with the supercomputer team at IBM’s Zurich Research Laboratory. The breakthrough method they developed combines density measurements with a large-scale mechanical analysis of the inner-bone microstructure.

Using large-scale, massively parallel simulations, the researchers were able to obtain a dynamic ‘heat map’ of strain, which changes with the load applied to the bone. This map shows the clinician exactly where and under what load a bone is likely to fracture.

Dr Costas Bekas, part of IBM’s computational sciences team, explained: “Knowing when and where a bone is likely to fracture, a clinician can also detect osteoporotic damage more precisely and, by adjusting a surgical plate appropriately, can determine its optimal location.”

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IBM’s new supercomputer will be used by the Naval Oceanograhpic Office Major Shared Resource Center (MSRC) to prevent disasters at sea.

The supercomputer, a Power 575 Hydro-Cluster, has a peak speed of 90 teraflops (90 trillion floating-point operations per second), making it one of the most powerful systems in the Department of Defense.

The NAVO MSRC is one of four Department of Defense High Performance Computing MSRCs established under the auspices of the DoD High Performance Computing Modernization Program.

“The Power 575 supercomputer is specifically designed for the type of computationally intensive work undertaken by NAVO,” said Dave Turek, vice president of deep computing for IBM. “This system will enhance DoD research efforts and significantly enhance the ability to perform detailed oceanographic modeling and weather forecasting that will help keep the naval fleet and commercial shippers out of harm’s way.”

The Power 575 Hydro-Cluster is powered by one of the world’s fastest microprocessors, POWER6, and is cooled by an innovative water system that makes it highly energy-efficient. The Power 575 is designed to help users tackle some of the world’s most challenging problems in fields such as energy, aerospace and weather modeling.

An American military supercomputer, built with components designed for the Sony PlayStation 3, has reached a computing milestone by processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second.

Codenamned Roadrunner, IBM’s new machine is twice as fast as the company’s previous offering, the BlueGene/L (pictured left).

It will be used principally to solve classified military problems to ensure that the nation’s stockpile of nuclear weapons will continue to work correctly as they age.

It will also be used for research into astronomy, genomics and climate change.

“Roadrunner will enable us to tackle problems we couldn’t tackle before,” said John Morrison, leader of the high-performance computing division at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in California, where it will be installed.

“We’ll be able to run a different level of problems. We’ll be able to do calculations that we wouldn’t even consider before.”

IBM has announced a research breakthrough in photovoltaics technology that could reduce the cost of harnessing the Sun’s power for electricity.

By mimicking the antics of a child using a magnifying glass to burn a leaf or a camper to start a fire, IBM scientists are using a large lens to concentrate the Sun’s power, capturing a record 230 watts onto a centimeter square solar cell, in a technology known as concentrator photovoltaics, or CPV. That energy is then converted into 70 watts of usable electrical power, about five times the electrical power density generated by typical cells using CPV technology in solar farms.

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