#CLOUD: "World's Largest Academic Cloud"

Not to be left behind in the dust of industry marching forward, academia recently unveiled their largest cloud computing platform, aimed at providing the petabytes of storage required for giant scientific simulations and big-data analytics.



The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) Cloud is connected to 10 other supercomputer sites nationwide on the high-speed TeraGrid network.

The world's largest academic cloud, the SDSC Cloud, serves University of California at San Diego researchers and their associates, including 10 supercomputer centers nationwide connected by the high-speed TeraGrid.
Hosted at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, the SDSC Cloud offers academic researchers the resources to run gigantic simulations and analytics that they could not afford to support on commercial cloud providers.

The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) Cloud is connected to 10 other supercomputer sites nationwide on the high-speed TeraGrid network.
"The SDSC Cloud may well revolutionize how data is preserved and shared," said Michael Norman, director of SDSC. "Every data object has a unique URL [universal resource locator] and can be accessed over the Web."
The Web-based storage array is capable of 8-to-10 gigabyte per second sustained transfer rates over 768 Ethernet connections each running at 10-Gbits per second. Storage capacity today is 5.5 petabytes and is expected to grow to hundreds of petabytes as it scales linearly with each added resource.
Conceived in UC San Diego's Research Cyberinfrastructure (RCI) project, the initiative grew in scope to now include UC San Diego’s Libraries, School of Medicine, Rady School of Management, Jacobs School of Engineering, and SDSC research faculty doing federally-funded research projects at the National Science Foundation, National Institutes for Health, and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. All these centers can now share data sets in the same SDSC Cloud.
"The SDSC Cloud marks a paradigm shift," said Richard Moore, SDSC’s deputy director. "One that says 'if you think your data is important, then it should be readily accessible and shared with the broader community'."
The key to the SDSC Cloud's ease-of-use is a program written for large NASA data sets by Rackspace called the OpenStack Swift Object Storage app. OpenStack organizes files into objects that are written to multiple physical storage arrays simultaneously, keeping at least two verified copies on different servers at all times. Also a Cloud Backup package uses SDSC's CommVault Backup service with continuous automatic data verification and integration with commercial cloud providers Rackspace and Amazon's S3 to allow a third copy to be replicated off-site for increased security.
Next month the SDSC Cloud will also start transferring huge data sets over simultaneous multiple 10-Gbit per second connections to CENIC (Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California), ESNet (Energy Sciences Network), and XSEDE (Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment).
The SDSC Cloud can also make use of the other advanced supercomputer services at the San Diego Supercomputer Center including its Data Oasis which can transfer three terabytes of data per minute, and Gordon--the world's first supercomputer to integrate large flash-based SSDs (solid state drives) for six terabyte per minute transfers.
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#3D: "3D Pico Projectors Grow at Double Digits"

As sizes shrink down to palm-size pico projectors, and with a new injection of interest from 3D, double-digit market growth in projectors offers a beacon of hope that global economic uncertainty cannot dim.



Despite worldwide economic volatility, the growing markets for pico-size projectors as well as growing interest in 3D will enable double-digit growth for front projectors from 2011 to 2015, according to Pacific Media Associates.
PMA predicts that front projectors will grow 22 percent compared to 2010, topping 10.4 million unit shipments in 2011, and by 2015 are predicted to exceed 39.4 million units. PMA claims to have uncovered the technological features and product segments that are causing this market's fast growth rate in its recent biennial survey of U.S. front-projector users.

The thumb-size pico-projector's micro mirror is fabricated in the center of a thumbnail-size MEMS chip (Source: Microvision)
According to PMA, the factors affecting growth were different among users of three different categories of projectors, based on their size and output power.
In the "New Era" category, the biggest draw was the small size of the pico-size projectors enabled by micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) chips that have downsized the micron-size mirrors for palm-size projectors. Pico projectors are also going 3D, with the latest announcement coming from Microvision, which now offers a dual-lens laser-based unit that projects 3D in a manner similar to the digital cinema projectors, requiring only inexpensive, passive polarized glasses.
Among users of pico projectors (under 500 lumens), the biggest difference was between enterprises versus individual consumers, according to the PMA. Presentations were cited as the most frequent application 75 percent of the time by organizations. For individual consumers, on the other hand, only 35 percent cited the use of pico projectors for presentations. For individuals, viewing photos was cited as the more frequent application 58 percent of the time, as opposed to organizational users who only viewed photos 45 percent of the time.
The second highest use of pico projectors by both groups was watching videos, where 60 percent of organizations and 55 percent of individual consumers used them to project videos. As a result, many models of video cameras, camcorders and even some digital still cameras are now including a built-in pico projector. Pico projectors are also being built into high-end smartphones, according to PMA, which is proving to be popular in developing countries where a user's phone is their main computing device.
In the "Mainstream" category of 500-to-4,999 lumens at PMA, front projectors were used mainly in classrooms, corporate meeting rooms, and in home theater settings, where nearly 8 million units will be sold in 2011. PMA predicts that mainstream projectors will grow by 50 percent over the next five years to top 12 million units by 2015.
Education continues to be a main driver for mainstream projectors, despite austere government budgets worldwide, but technology is also driving acceptance at corporations. For instance, PC-free presentations are driving corporate users to favor newer devices that include WiFi so that the projector is wirelessly controlled from the presenter’s handheld unit, such as a touch-screen tablet or smartphone.
The High-End projectors with 5,000 lumens of output or more are mostly used for digital cinema, auditoriums and in science for simulation and visualization apps. PMA predicts that double-digit grow rates will more than double the sales of high-end projectors, up from 200,000 units in 2011 to over 430,000 units by 2015, a compound annual growth rate of about 21 percent. In this market, new high-end widescreen models are driving a modernization of existing theaters and auditoriums as well as pioneering emerging markets in developing countries.
Further Reading

#OPTICS: "World's First Nanoscale Optical Fibers'

Photonic chips that compute with light instead of electricity--the holy grail of optics--will enable a faster, more sustainable Internet, by virtue of lowering its power consumption with the world's smallest optical fibers.



Researchers have created nanowires generated by direct laser writing, here stacked to form a three-dimensional woodpile photonic crystal with a pronounced stop gap.

At its current rate of growth, the Internet is on track to consume half the world's energy in the next decade, according to professor Min Gu, the Director of the Centre for Micro-Photonics at Swinburne University of Technology. To head off the debacle, Gu's research group has created the world's smallest optical fibers, which he claims will enable not only a faster, but a more sustainable Internet, by virtue of reduced energy consumption.
"The Internet has become a major energy consumer," said Gu. "In the next decade the Internet will account for half of the world’s energy usage--so making it more efficient will make a huge difference to our carbon footprint."

Researchers have created nanowires generated by direct laser writing, here stacked to form a three-dimensional woodpile photonic crystal with a pronounced stop gap.
His research team, which was recently ranked among the top 100 universities for physics research in the Academic Ranking of World Universities published annually by the Shanghai Ranking Consultancy, is working with the six university, Australian government funded, effort to stem Internet power consumption at the Centre for Ultrahigh bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems. The aim of CUDOS is to create an all-photonics Internet that drastically cuts energy consumption by computing with light instead of electricity.
Photonics encodes the binary ones and zeros of Internet communications on pulses of light instead of electronic charge packets. Electricity must overcome the resistance of the wires through which it travels, which causes them to heat up, wasting much of the energy required for communications signals. As a result, all long-haul Internet communications today are performed with optical fibers which carry signals between metropolitan areas faster and without all the heat.
However, once the signals reach their target city, they are translated into electrical signals with expensive, power hungry converters which receive the weightless photons of light from the long-haul fibers and translate them into electrical signals that travel down a cable- or digital-subscriber link (DSL) to the user's computer. Likewise, between distant metropolitan areas "repeaters" must periodically translate the optical signals into electrical ones, then use high powered lasers to re-encode the electrical signals as light pulses that continue down fibers to the next repeater.
The holy grail of photonics is to eliminate the need for repeaters, cable, DSL and even the wires between the chips inside your computer with nanoscale optical fibers that perform all computing with light, eliminating the need to ever translate weightless, energy conserving photons into heavy, energy wasting electrons. With optical fibers small enough, even the communications signals on the processor inside your computer could be made optical, saving energy for computers, routers, and other communications equipment as well as extending the battery life of the mobile device themselves.
In its most recent step toward realizing the dream of all-optical computing, doctoral candidate Elisa Nicoletti working on a CUDOS project in Gu's lab, created the world's smallest optical fibers. Measuring just 68 nanometers in diameter, the new optical fibers are small enough to be used inside all-optical routers, switches and other future photonic microchips. Measuring just one-twelfth the wavelength of the light being transmitted through them, the nanofibers were directly written with a laser onto microchips using a nonlinear material called a chalcogenide.
Other groups have created nano wires out of plastic, which is a passive material that merely passes the signal. But by using chalcogenide, Gu's group was able to demonstrate nanowires constructed into a three-dimensional "woodpile" photonic crystal with a pronounced stop gap. Such structures can work with laser-powered light pumps to perform all the functions performed today with power-hungry electrical routers and switches.
Further Reading

#SPACE: "NASA'S Planet Hunter Bags a First"

NASA's Kepler spacecraft is logging planet after planet, finding more potential exoplanets in its first month than all of the previous terrestrial efforts in history. Recently Kepler found the first planet orbiting two stars simultaneously, and it only just beginning...
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#MEMS: "ICs entering mass consumer markets"

As MEMS enters the mainstream, the high-volume markets will favor mergers and acquisitions over the next five years, as the larger player fill in the gaps of their integrated solution for OEMs, who must fuse the outputs of multiple MEMS sensors for a wider variety of applications than just tablets and phones.
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#CLOUD: "Enterprise Telecom Migrating to Cloud"

Telecommunications infrastructure is the latest enterprise asset to begin the move to cloud-based solutions. And over the next five years ABI Research predicts a mass migration of enterprise communications applications to the cloud.Premises-based communications and telecommunications capabilities including email, telephony, as well as audio-, video- and Web-conferencing, are steadily shifting to cloud-based solutions, according to ABI Research, which predicts that 41 percent of all enterprise communications application users worldwide will migrate to the cloud by 2016.
"The communications customers-premises equipment [CPE] market will only be growing at a 4.3 percent rate, while cloud communications will be growing at over 21 percent, reaching $8 billion in revenues by 2016," said ABI senior analyst Subha Rama.
The migration trend for enterprise applications infrastructure will steadily shift from customer premises equipment (CPE) to private and public cloud-based solutions, according to ABI Research.
Driving the CPE-to-cloud migration trend, according to ABI Research, is the general adoption of data center-based virtualization technologies, the need to offer a "connected experience" to mobile users of smartphones and tablets, and the potential of lower costs and higher efficiencies for cloud-based solutions.
CPE vendors will feel the squeeze the most, according to ABI Research, as their customer base slowly erodes in favor of public-, private- and hybrid-cloud solutions. Within five years, CPE will have lost 386 million users to virtual infrastructure solutions, with the drain steadily increasing as enterprises gain more confidence in migrating information and communications technology (ICT) to the cloud.
Many enterprises are hesitant to make major investments in the transition to cloud infrastructure, according to ABI Research, which explains that extending the lifetime of legacy CPE solutions will continue as long as the cost of transitioning to the cloud remains relatively high. But as the price tag drops, the cloud transition will accelerate in direct proportion.
According to ABI Research, cloud technology is acknowledged as increasing business agility through infrastructure consolidation, but the difficulties of managing security, exposure and integration with existing infrastructure will favor a steady, orderly transition rather than a quick switch. For the time being, hybrid approaches that allow legacy systems to continue to be useful will dominate, especially for large enterprises that face considerable investment costs to make the transition.
Smaller CPE vendors will feel the squeeze the most, according to ABI Research, since larger CPE vendors are already transitioning their own telecommunications capabilities to the cloud, potentially offsetting their losses to newer cloud-only vendors. The vendors expected to do best will be those that make the cloud transition seamless and without performance penalties, according to ABI's report titled: "Enterprise Cloud Applications and Vertical Analysis."
Further Reading

#WIRELESS: "Subconscious Smartphone Extends Battery Life"

A new subconscious mode for smartphones, announced at this week’s Mobile Computing and Networking conference, can improve battery life by more than 50 percent using the smarter algorithm. Savvy smartphone users know they can save battery life by switching off WiFi, but few take the trouble since it’s so convenient to just leave it at the ready to speed up Internet access. Now a new subconscious-mode could let smartphone users have their cake and eat it too.
Proposed by University of Michigan professor Kang Shin and prototyped by doctoral candidate Xinyu Zhang, smartphones and other devices with WiFi can license the new subconscious mode to extend smartphone battery life by as much as 50 percent.
WiFi speeds Internet connections by running orders of magnitude faster than typical 3G connections, convincing most smartphone users that it is worth leaving on so that acceleration is automatic whenever a familiar WiFi signal is detected. As a result, smartphones spend most of their time in what is called the "idle listening" mode, waiting for data-packets to arrive that could be transmitted by the nearest, strongest WiFi connection, as well as listening for incoming WiFi communication intended for it.
The team estimates that more than 90 percent of mobile devices with WiFi spend up to 80 percent of their time in idle mode today. The new subconscious mode, on the other hand, cuts power to the WiFi circuits until they are needed, then springs back to life before any data packets can be lost, greatly extending battery life without having to manually turn WiFi on and off.
The official name of the subconscious mode, coined by Shin and Zhang, is Energy-Minimizing Idle Listening (E-MiLi) and is being proposed by its inventors to original-equipment manufacturers (OEMs) of all types of WiFi equipped battery powered devices.
The techniques used by the researchers to achieve the savings was to down-clock the WiFi circuits by 16 times while they are in E-MiLi mode, then quickly ramp the clock speed back up whenever a packet arrives to be transmitted or when the smartphone's address is present in an incoming WiFi header. The outgoing activation was easy to achieve, according to Shin and Zhang, but detecting incoming packets while clocked down required custom algorithms that listen specifically for packet headers addressed to it.
To implement new E-MiLi mode, smartphone makers will have to add the algorithms for varying the WiFi circuits clock rate, plus WiFi chip-makers will have to adopt the new easy-to-recognize header structure that is recognizable even to down-clocked WiFi chips. Shin predicts that other wireless protocols, such as the industrial ZigBee wireless networks, will also adopt the technique to enable similar power savings on their mobile devices.

Further Reading

#MEDICAL: "Dr. Watson Diagnoses Medical Maladies"

IBM's Watson technology has put on its white coat and stethoscope at WellPoint in order to simplify and speed up the diagnosis of diseases by matching symptom sets in real time with millions of medical records, journal articles and research results. IBM's Watson was demonstrated to the world earlier this year as able to beat the most talented human contestants in the TV game show "Jeopardy." Nevertheless, Watson's artificial intelligence (AI) was always intended to improve the human condition rather than leapfrog it. As the first major step toward that goal, WellPoint, the nation's largest health benefits provider, is using Watson to help make more accurate and informed medical diagnoses.
With millions of pages of medical journals, research results and physician reports produced each year, diagnoses of difficult symptoms often involve successive appointments with multiple specialists until a patient finds a suitable treatment plan. WellPoint is aiming to speed up and improve the accuracy of medical diagnoses by using Watson to scan the vast volumes of data from those sources to match patients' symptoms with known successful treatment plans.
As the first commercial application of Watson's AI, WellPoint's solution will deliver up-to-the-minute evidence-based medical diagnoses for millions of Americans enrolled in its various health plans nationwide. WellPoint, including its various affiliates such as Blue Cross and Blue Shield, is the nation's largest health benefits organization with 34 million members in its health plans and 36 million more served through its subsidiaries. Watson's scalability, allowing its algorithms to be run on cluster supercomputers which can be brought online on-demand, will allow it to serve nearly any number of multiple, simultaneous diagnostic sessions. WellPoint said it was banking on Watson's ability to analyze the meaning of symptom sets and match them with available treatment plans, which will be presented to doctors and nurses as a list of "most likely" diagnoses.
"We believe [Watson] will be an invaluable resource for our partnering physicians and will dramatically enhance the quality and effectiveness of medical care they deliver to our members," said WellPoint's Chief Medical Officer Sam Nussbaum.
IBM will work with WellPoint to adapt Watson's AI from playing on "Jeopardy" to medical diagnostics, crafting algorithms that also analyze the interactions among drugs and therapies to ensure that no unforeseen side effects result from the treatment regimes it suggests. Watson will also be programmed to streamline communications among physicians during complex clinical review cases, quickly directing patients to the physician within their health plan and service area that already has a high success rate at treating similar maladies.
WellPoint’s "Dr. Watson" is planned for initial deployment in a pilot program in early in 2012.
Further Reading