An anonymous reader writes to tell us that Physicists from both the University of Surrey and Salford University have devised a method to trap a multi-colored rainbow of light inside a prism. "Previous attempts to slow and capture light have involved extremely low or cryogenic temperatures, have been extremely costly, and have only worked with one specific frequency of light at a time. The technique proposed by Professor Hess and Mr Kosmas Tsakmakidis involves the use of negative refractive index metamaterials along with the exploitation of the Goos Hänchen effect, which shows that when light hits an object or an interface between two media it does not immediately bounce back but seems to travel very slightly along that object, or in the case of metamaterials, travels very slightly backwards along the object."

Stony Stevenson writes "Canadian researchers have promised to squeeze "decades" of cancer research into just two years by harnessing the power of a global PC grid. The scientists are the first from Canada to use IBM's World Community Grid network of PCs and laptops with the power equivalent to one of the globe's top five fastest supercomputers. The team will use the grid to analyze the results of experiments on proteins using data collected by scientists at the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute in Buffalo, New York. The researchers estimate that this analysis would take conventional computer systems 162 years to complete."

BBCWatcher writes "As Slashdot reported previously, Congress is pushing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to develop energy efficiency measures for data centers, especially servers. But IBM is impatient: Computerworld notes IBM has signed up Neuwing Energy Ventures, a company trading in energy efficiency certificates, in a first for "green" computing. Now if your company consolidates, say, X86 servers onto an IBM mainframe on top of slashing about 85% off your electric bill each megawatt-hour saved earns one certificate. Then you can sell the certificates in emerging carbon trading markets. IBM's own consolidation project (collapsing 3,900 distributed servers onto 30 mainframes) will net certificates worth between $300K and $1M, depending on carbon's market price. Will ubiquitous carbon trading discourage energy-inefficient, distributed-style infrastructure in favor of highly virtualized and I/O-savvy environments, particularly mainframes?"

Stony Stevenson writes "A group of researchers at Florida state have demonstrated a magnet design that could shed new light on nanoscience and semiconductor research. 'The Split Florida Helix magnet can direct and scatter laser light at a sample down the centre of the magnet and from four ports on the sides. Due to become fully operational in 2010, the device can generate fields above 25 tesla. The highest-field split magnet in the world currently attains 18 tesla ... The scientists will be able to expand the scope of their experimental approach, learning more about the intrinsic properties of materials by shining light on crystals from angles not previously available in such high magnetic fields.'"

mytrip wrote with a note that the PlayStation 3 should be very proud of itself. Sony's monster-powerful console has lifted Stanford's very own distributed computing project (Folding@home) into the record books. "Guinness has apparently certified the project as the world's most powerful distributed computing system. According to a release from Sony, Folding@home topped 1 petaflop last month, meaning that it surpassed a thousand trillion floating point operations per second. By comparison, the well-known SETI@home project has topped out, according to Wikipedia, at around 265 teraflops, or 265 trillion floating point operations a second." There appears to be a team slashdot if you're looking for someone to support. Go fighting 006666!

An anonymous reader writes "Supercomputers small enough to fit into the palm of your hand are only 10 or 15 years away, according to Professor Michael Zaiser, a researcher at the University of Edinburgh School of Engineering and Electronics. Zaiser has been researching how tiny nanowires — 1000 times thinner than a human hair — behave when manipulated. Apparently such minuscule wires behave differently under pressure, so it has up until now been impossible to arrange them in tiny microprocessors in a production environment. Zaiser says he's figured out how to make them behave uniformly. These "tamed" nanowires could go inside microprocessors that could, in turn, go inside PCs, laptops, mobile phones or even supercomputers. And the smaller the wires, the smaller the chip can be. "If things continue to go the way they have been in the past few decades, then it's 10 years... The human brain is very good at working on microprocessor problems, so I think we are close — 10 years, maybe 15," Zaiser said."

An anonymous reader writes "NEC has announced the NEC SX-9 claiming it to be the fastest vector computer, with single core speeds of up to 102.4 GFLOPS and up to 1.6TFLOPS on a single node incorporating multiple CPUs. The machines can be used in complex large-scale computation, such as climates, aeronautics and space, environmental simulations, fluid dynamics, through the processing of array-handling with a single vector instruction. Yes, it runs a UNIX System V-compatible OS."

Jamie found a story about a inexpensive supercomputer being used by an astrophysicist to research gravity waves. The interesting bit is that the system is built using 8 PS3s. Since nobody is actually playing games on the system, it makes sense to use them for research projects like this, but I really wonder now what is defining 'Supercomputer'... I mean, a hundred PS3s sure, but 8? I think we are de-valuing the meaning of the word 'super' :)

prostoalex writes "IEEE Spectrum looks at current trends in artificial technology to crack the ancient Chinese game of Go, which theoretically has 10^60 potential endings. Is conquering the game via exhaustive search of all possibilities possible? 'My gut feeling is that with some optimization a machine that can search a trillion positions per second would be enough to play Go at the very highest level. It would then be cheaper to build the machine out of FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays) instead of the much more expensive and highly unwieldy full-custom chips. That way, university students could easily take on the challenge.'"

John "butter/oreo" Bajana-Bacall writes to tell us that IBM and Google have decided to team up to provide cloud computing resources to participating college students. "Most of the innovation in cloud computing has been led by corporations, but industry executives and computer scientists say a shortage of skills and talent could limit future growth. 'We in academia and the government labs have not kept up with the times,' said Randal E. Bryant, dean of the computer science school at Carnegie Mellon University. 'Universities really need to get on board.' Six universities will be involved in the initiative. They are Carnegie Mellon, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Maryland and the University of Washington."

holy_calamity writes "Two research teams have independently made quantum computers that run the prime-number-factorising Shor's algorithm — a significant step towards breaking public key cryptography. Most of the article is sadly behind a pay-wall, but a blog post at the New Scientist site nicely explains how the algorithm works. From the blurb: 'The advent of quantum computers that can run a routine called Shor's algorithm could have profound consequences. It means the most dangerous threat posed by quantum computing - the ability to break the codes that protect our banking, business and e-commerce data - is now a step nearer reality. Adding to the worry is the fact that this feat has been performed by not one but two research groups, independently of each other. One team is led by Andrew White at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, and the other by Chao-Yang Lu of the University of Science and Technology of China, in Hefei.'"

Stony Stevenson writes to mention that some security researchers are claiming that the Storm Worm has grown so massive that it could rival the world's top supercomputers in terms of raw power. "Sergeant said researchers at MessageLabs see about 2 million different computers in the botnet sending out spam on any given day, and he adds that he estimates the botnet generally is operating at about 10 percent of capacity. 'We've seen spikes where the owner is experimenting with something and those spikes are usually five to 10 times what we normally see,' he said, noting he suspects the botnet could be as large as 50 million computers. 'That means they can turn on the taps whenever they want to.'"

Luke writes "This past winter Calvin College professor Joel Adams and then Calvin senior Tim Brom built Microwulf, a portable supercomputer with 26.25 gigaflops peak performance, that cost less than $2,500 to construct, becoming the most cost-efficient supercomputer anywhere that Adams knows of. "It's small enough to check on an airplane or fit next to a desk," said Brom. Instead of a bunch of researchers having to share a single Beowulf cluster supercomputer, now each researcher can have their own."

Shipud writes "The National Science Foundation, Public Library of Science and the San Diego Supercomputing Center have partnered to set up what can best be described as a "YouTube for scientists", SciVee". Scientists can upload their research papers, accompanied by a video where they describe the work in the form of a short lecture, accompanied by a presentation. The formulaic, technical style of scientific writing, the heavy jargonization and the need for careful elaboration often renders reading papers a laborious effort. SciVee's creators hope that that the appeal of a video or audio explanation of paper will make it easier for others to more quickly grasp the concepts of a paper and make it more digestible both to colleagues and to the general public."

eldavojohn writes "MIT's Microsystems Technology Laboratories is focusing on the manufacturing of chips as the variables that affect chip quality become more and more influential. From one of the researchers, "The extremely high speeds of these circuits make them very sensitive to both device and interconnect parameters. The circuit may still work, but with the nanometer-scale deviations in geometry, capacitance or other material properties of the interconnect, these carefully tuned circuits don't operate together at the speed they're supposed to achieve.""

eldavojohn writes "IBM has turned to long time rival Sun in an effort to bring Solaris to its mainframes. Sun may be taking this chance to drop out of the server market while at the same time capture Solaris subscriptions via IBM sales. Either way, this certainly pressures HP in the server department."

eldavojohn writes "Researchers have released a new paper on quantum computing theorizing how to use optically controlled electrons to make an ultrafast quantum computer. From the article, "Scientists have designed a scheme to create one of the fastest quantum computers to date using light pulses to rotate electron spins, which serve as quantum bits. This technique improves the overall clock rate of the quantum computer, which could lead to the fastest potentially scalable quantum computing scheme of which the scientists are aware.""

Jamie found another MIT Technology review story, this time about Chess, Supercomputing, Garry Kasparov, and trying to make sense of just what exactly it all meant when a computer finally beat a grand master. An interesting piece that touches on what it means to play chess, the difference between humanity and machinery and how super computers don't care when they are losing. Worth your time.

An anonymous reader writes "The NSF has tentatively announced that the Track 1 leadership class supercomputer will be awarded to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The Track 2 award winner is University of Tennessee-Knoxville and its partners." From the article: "In the first award, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) will receive $208 million over 4.5 years to acquire and make available a petascale computer it calls "Blue Waters," which is 500 times more powerful than today's typical supercomputers. The system is expected to go online in 2011. The second award will fund the deployment and operation of an extremely powerful supercomputer at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville Joint Institute for Computational Science (JICS). The $65 million, 5-year project will include partners at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Texas Advanced Computing Center, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research."

An anonymous reader writes "According to documents accidentally placed on a federal government Web site for a short time last week the national science foundation (NSF) will award the contract to buy a $200M supercomputer in 2011 to IBM. The machine is designed to perform scientific calculations at sustained speed of 1 petaflop. The award is already proving controversial however, with questions being raised about the correctness of the bidding procedure. Similar concerns have also been raised about the award of a smaller machine to Oak Ridge national lab, which is a Department of Energy laboratory, not a site one would expect to house an NSF machine."