The cloud is becoming a bigger part of IBM’s business, and the technology giant is expanding its data center offerings.
IBM CEO Ginni Rometty announced at the company’s InterConnect conference in Las Vegas Tuesday a new data center in China, its 51st overall in 20 nations.
JUDY WOODRUFF: For decades, researchers have worked to create a better and more direct connection between a human brain and a computer to improve the lives of people who are paralyzed or have severe limb weakness from diseases like ALS.
Those advances have been notable, but now the work is yielding groundbreaking results.
Special correspondent Cat Wise has the story.
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(Phys.org)—Scientists have built tiny logic machines out of single atoms that operate completely differently than conventional logic devices do. Instead of relying on the binary switching paradigm like that used by transistors in today’s computers, the new nanoscale logic machines physically simulate the problems and take advantage of the inherent randomness that governs the behavior of physical systems at the nanoscale—randomness that is usually considered a drawback.
The team of researchers, Barbara Fresch et al., from universities in Belgium, Italy, Australia, Israel, and the US, have published a paper on the new nanoscale logic machines in a recent issue of Nano Letters.
“Our approach shows the possibility of a new class of tiny analog computers that can solve computationally difficult problems by simple statistical algorithms running in nanoscale solid-state physical devices,” coauthor Francoise Remacle at the University of Liege told Phys.org.
TeraHertz pulses in semiconductor crystal (credit: Fabian Langer, Regensburg University)
Using extremely short pulses of teraHertz (THz) radiation instead of electrical currents could lead to future computers that run ten to 100,000 times faster than today’s state-of-the-art electronics, according to an international team of researchers, writing in the journal Nature Photonics.
In a conventional computer, electrons moving through a semiconductor occasionally run into other electrons, releasing energy in the form of heat and slowing them down. With the proposed “lightwave electronics” approach, electrons could be guided by ultrafast THz pulses (the part of the electromagnetic spectrum between microwaves and infrared light). That means the travel time can be so short that the electrons would be statistically unlikely to hit anything, according to senior author Rupert Huber, a professor of physics at the University of Regensburg who led the experiment.
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Researchers at ETH Zurich and IBM Research Zurich have built a tiny redox flow battery. This means that future computer chip stacks — in which individual chips are stacked like pancakes to save space and energy — could be supplied with electrical power and cooled at the same time by such integrated flow batteries (Energy & Environmental Science, “3D-printed fluidic networks for high-power-density heat-managing miniaturized redox flow batteries”).
In a flow battery, an electrochemical reaction is used to produce electricity out of two liquid electrolytes, which are pumped to the battery cell from outside via a closed electrolyte loop.
