Computers Blog

Platform As A Service, or PaaS is the latest development in virtualization. Where companies started to offer applications online (Saas, Software As A Service) and the use of virtual servers is becoming mainstream, more and more companies now offer a complete operating system as a service online.
Cloudo is the latest addition to platform providers. There are several others that have existed for a while now in the consumer market, but to be honest I have no idea if there is a consumer market for this technology. Virtualization is huge in the business market - after offering servers with virtual servers on top even SUN Microsystems now considers offering online platforms for businesses.

So what is so interesting about Cloudo? Why would we want a webbased operating system? Well, something that makes a huge difference is the option to sync your files to the operating system. Until now, nobody else offers this.

There currently is a private beta for developers only, so there’s nothing for me there right now. But I will keep an eye on it. (more…)

Research results from University of Maryland physicists show that graphene, a new material that combines aspects of semiconductors and metals, could be a leading candidate to replace silicon in applications ranging from high-speed computer chips to biochemical sensors.

The research, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and published online in the journal Nature Nanotechnolgy, reveals that graphene conducts electricity at room temperature with less intrinsic resistance than any other known material.

“Graphene is one of the materials being considered as a potential replacement of silicon for future computing,” said NSF Program Manager Charles Ying. “The recent results obtained by the University of Maryland researchers provide directions to achieve high-electron speed in graphene near room temperature, which is critically important for practical applications”.

Intrinsic resistance results from the unavoidable lattice vibrations in a material when the temperature is greater than absolute zero. The intrinsic resistance determines a material’s mobility, or the speed at which an electrons move when an electric field is applied to the material. The very high mobility of graphene makes it promising for applications in which transistors must switch extremely fast, such as in the processing of extremely high frequency signals. If other extrinsic factors that limit mobility in graphene, such as impurities and lattice vibrations in the substrate on which graphene sits, could be eliminated, the intrinsic mobility in graphene would be higher than any other known material, and more than 100 times higher than silicon.

Graphene is also a very promising material for chemical and biochemical sensing applications in which an electrical signal from, for instance, a molecule adsorbed on the sensing device, is translated into an electrical signal by changing the conductivity of the device. The low resistivity and extremely thin nature of graphene also holds promise for applications in thin, mechanically tough, electrically conducting transparent films. Such films are sorely needed in a variety of electronics applications, from touch screens to photovoltaic cells.

Principal investigator Michael Fuhrer of the University of Maryland’s Center for Nanophysics and Advanced Materials and the Maryland NanoCenter, said the electrical current in graphene is carried by only a few electrons moving much faster than the electrons in a metal like silver. “Our current samples of graphene are fairly ‘dirty’ due to some extraneous sources of resistivity,” Fuhrer said. “Once we remove that dirt, graphene, at room temperature, should have about 35 percent less resistivity than silver, the lowest resistivity material known at room (more…)

That’s what some folks are saying about Microsoft’s new partnerships with LinkedIn, Tagged, Hi5, Bebo and Facebook. Calling it a new commitment to openness and data portability, the partnerships allow users of those sites to import their Windows Live contacts and vice versa. While this will make it easier for users to invited their contacts to the social networking service of their choice, it may also give spammers a new tool. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a wave of fake invites from spammers. Microsoft claims this new tool is much safer than the old “screen scraping” technique. What do you think? (more…)

Scientists at the University of Rochester have digitally reproduced music in a file nearly 1,000 times smaller than a regular MP3 file.

The music, a 20-second clarinet solo, is encoded in less than a single kilobyte, and is made possible by two innovations: recreating in a computer both the real-world physics of a clarinet and the physics of a clarinet player.

The achievement, announced recently at the International Conference on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing held in Las Vegas, is still not a flawless reproduction of an original performance, but the scientists say it’s getting close.

“This is essentially a human-scale system of reproducing music,” says Mark Bocko, professor of electrical and computer engineering and co-creator of the technology. “Humans can manipulate their tongue, breath, and fingers only so fast, so in theory we shouldn’t really have to measure the music a number of thousands of times a second like we do on a CD. As a result, I think we may have found the absolute least amount of data needed to reproduce a piece of music.”

In replaying the music, a computer literally reproduces the original performance based on everything it knows about clarinets and clarinet playing. Two of Bocko’s doctoral students, Xiaoxiao Dong and Mark Sterling, worked with Bocko to measure every aspect of a clarinet that affects its sound-from the backpressure in the mouthpiece for every different fingering, to the way sound radiates from the instrument. They then built a computer model of the clarinet, and the result is a virtual instrument built entirely from the real-world acoustical measurements.

The team then set about creating a virtual player for the virtual clarinet. They modeled how a clarinet player interacts with the instrument including the fingerings, the force of breath, and the pressure of the player’s lips to determine how they would affect the response of the virtual clarinet. Then, says Bocko, it’s a matter of letting the computer “listen” to a real clarinet performance to infer and record the various actions mandatory to create a specific sound. The original sound is then reproduced by feeding the record of the player’s actions back into the computer model. (more…)

Robot soccer is an ambitious high-tech competition for universities, research institutes and industry. Several major tournaments are planned for 2008, the biggest of which is the ‘RoboCup German Open’. From April 21-25, over 80 teams of scientists from more than 15 countries are expected to face off in Hall 25 at the Hannover Messe. In a series of soccer matches in several leagues, they will be putting the latest technologies on display. The tournament is being organized and carried out by the Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems IAIS in Sankt Augustin.

For a machine, a soccer match is a highly complex endeavor. Robots must be able to reliably recognize the ball, the sidelines and the goalposts in addition to distinguishing between their teammates and opponents. To this end, they are outfitted with all sorts of high-tech equipment: cameras and sensors scan the robots’ surroundings, internal processors convert data to define game tactics and defense strategies, and innovative engines allow the automated players to sprint across the field and unexpectedly fake out their opponents.

There are now nine leagues, each of which has its own technological focus. In the middle-size league, robots get around on wheels. Four players and a goalkeeper compete for each team on a 20 x 14-meter pitch with standard soccer goals. They must be able to function completely independently and are equipped with internal camera systems that process information in real time. What’s more, the robots can move up to two meters per second. (more…)

A modern computer contains two different types of components: magnetic components, which perform memory functions, and semiconductor components, which perform logic operations. A University of Missouri researcher, as part of a multi-university research team, is working to combine these two functions in a single hybrid material. This new material would allow seamless integration of memory and logical functions and is expected to permit the design of devices that operate at much higher speeds and use considerably less power than current electronic devices.

Giovanni Vignale, MU physics professor in the College of Arts and Science and expert in condensed matter physics, says the primary goal of the research team, funded by a $6.5 million grant from the Department of Defense, is to explore new ways to integrate magnetism and magnetic materials with emerging electronic materials such as organic semiconductors. The research may lead to considerably more compact and energy-efficient devices. The processing costs for these hybrid materials are projected to be much less than those of traditional semiconductor chips, resulting in devices that should be less expensive to produce.

In this approach, the coupling between magnetic and non-magnetic components would occur via a magnetic field or flow of electron spin, which is the fundamental property of an electron and is responsible for most magnetic phenomena, Vignale said. The hybrid devices that we target would allow seamless integration of memory and logical function, high-speed optical communication and switching, and new sensor capabilities.

Vignale studies processes by which magnetic information can be transferred from a place to another. (more…)

Backscatter is a problem that arises when an email server receives bounced messages that come from remote site to a non-local recipient. In simple terms non-delivery reports or delivery status notifications are sent to a mail server that never originated the emails. Backscatter can be a big IT administrative headache, if it’s not fixed it can bring down a server and spammers can use this to create a DoS style attack. Best way to prevent Backscatter to prevent bounces generated to non-local recipients, the bounces should be rejected during SMTP session. Mike at Message Partners emailed me about his recent experience with Backscatter and read his recent post at his blog. For more information please visit Backscatter FAQ at Spamlinks. If you’ve got ideas, suggestions, questions or other ways to control spam please let me know, (more…)

What would you do if you had to copy a couple of hundred megs of data to 20 USB drives in under 5 minutes? That’’s easy, right? But look at the constraint - you have only one PC. Now, that’’s a toughie.

The Nexcopy USB duplicator allows you to copy as much as 250MB of data to 20 USB drives in one shot. In under 4 minutes. Now, who can beat that? For companies, this device can save much time and effort, for example, when duplicating official data on USB drives for distribution among employees. Or for a company marketing a new product during a promotional campaign.

This giant USB duplicator with equally giant possibilities sells at a pricey $1299.

Via OhGizmo. (more…)

It’s possible, and in some cases, it’s already happened. In any event, performing digital signal processing using organic and chemical materials without electrical currents could be the wave of the future - or so argue Sotirios Tsaftaris, research professor of electrical engineering and computer science, and Aggelos Katsaggelos, Ameritech Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, in their recently published “point of view” piece in the March 2008 edition of Proceedings of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.)

Digital signal processing uses mathematics and other techniques to manipulate signals like images (natural medical, and others) and sound waves after those signals have been converted to a digital form. This processing can enhance images and compress data for storage and transmission, and such processing chips are found in cell phones, iPods, and HD TVs.

But over the past 10 years, researchers and engineers around the world have experimented with performing signal processing using different materials. In their piece, Tsaftaris and Katsaggelos describe these experiments while stirring the engineering community towards “a possible not-so-electronic future” of digital signal processing. (more…)

For now, full-fledged quantum computers are the stuff of science fiction - in last summer’s blockbuster movie Transformers, the bad guys use quantum computing to break into the U.S. Army’s secure files in just 10 seconds flat.

But Prem Kumar, the AT&T Professor of Information Technology in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the director of the Center for Photonic Communication and Computing, and his research group are one step closer to realizing that technology - though for far better purposes. The group recently demonstrated one of the basic building blocks for distributed quantum computing using entangled photons generated in optical fibers, and their research was reported in the April 4 edition of Physical Review Letters.

“Because it is done with fiber and the technology that is already globally deployed, we believe that it is a significant step in harnessing the power of quantum computers,” Kumar says.

Quantum computing differs from classical computing in that a classical computer works by processing “bits” that exist in two states, either one or zero. Quantum computing uses quantum bits, or qubits, which, in addition to being one or zero can also be in a “superposition,” which is both one and zero simultaneously. This is possible because qubits are quantum units like atoms, ions, or photons that operate under the rules of quantum mechanics instead of classical mechanics.

The “superposition” state allows a quantum computer to process significantly more information than a classical computer and in a much shorter time.

The area of quantum computing took off about 14 years ago after mathematician/physicist Peter Shor created a quantum algorithm that could factor large integers much more efficiently than a classical computer. Such an algorithm put the computer world in a tizzy because a number of web sites secure information like credit card and bank account numbers over the Internet through the public-key cryptography method known as RSA, after its inventors Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman. This method is based on the assumption that it is computationally infeasible to factor very large integers on classical computers.

Though scientists are still a number of years away from creating a quantum computer capable of running the Shor algorithm, progress has been made. Kumar’s group, which uses photons as qubits, observed that they can entangle two indistinguishable photons together in an optical fiber very efficiently by using the fiber’s inherent nonlinear response. They also observed that no matter how far you separate the two photons in standard transmission fibers they remain entangled and are “mysteriously” connected to each other’s quantum state.

For this paper, Kumar and his team used the fiber-generated indistinguishable photons to implement the most basic quantum computer task - a controlled-NOT gate, which allows two photonic qubits to interact.

“This device that we demonstrated in the lab is a two-qubit device - nowhere near what’s needed for a quantum computer - so what can you do with it?” Kumar says. “It’s nice to demonstrate something useful to give a boost to the field, and there are some problems at hand that can be solved right now using what we have”.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has funded the group’s next effort to study how to implement a quantum network for physically demonstrating efficient public goods strategies, which are similar to the mechanism design theory that Nobel laureate Roger Myerson laid the foundation for while at Northwestern.

Kumar says such a network could help out with high stakes auctions, like if, for example, the Department of Defense wanted to build an expensive airplane and sends out a request for bids. No one company can build the entire airplane, and there could be 15 companies that can build some part of the airplane, whether it’s a navigation system or an engine.

But instead of just giving the project to the lowest bidder, the government could save public dollars by allowing these companies to bid in a complicated way that makes the process more efficient. Maybe the engine company has worked with the fuselage company before and, if they worked together again, could be more efficient and less expensive than another two companies working together. They could then send in a conditional set of bids, along with regular bids if the two companies were to work with other companies as well.

“Figuring out the best possible outcome is possible with quantum computers,” Kumar says. “Based on these fiber-type gates that we are building utilizing entanglement, the auctioneer has an efficient way of determining optimal outcomes when bidders make conditional bids. When the computation is done, it reveals only the winning strategy, and all other bids disappear”.

Kumar says they hope to perform this experiment sometime in the next year.

Posted by: Ethan