Posted by ketyung
on Dec/06/2007
at 6:22 am
No doubt supercomputer is super fast to solve all the very complex computational problems. But the downside is its size – the size of a fridge that makes it impossible for your to bring around to assist you to solve complex engineering problems, or for hackers to make their hacking life easier. So, did you get my point? No matter what reason, that always puts you into difficult situation that only a supercomputer can solve the problem for you, perhaps, you wouldn’t need to tolerate this difficulty for too long. As IBM has found a way to clam supercomputing power into a computer that is in the form of a laptop.
The research is based on the use of light pulses sent through silicon instead of electrical signals on wires which make up conventional computer chips and also promises incredibly energy efficient processors that would expend only the energy of a light bulb to achieve what current supercomputers do with enough power to run hundreds of homes.
The paper, published in the journal Optics Express, concerns the silicon Mach-Zehnder electro-optic modulator – a device which converts electrical signals into pulses of light and promises to significantly reduce cost, energy and heat while increasing communications bandwidth between the cores by a factor of more than 100 over wired chips. The new modulator, which according to IBM is 100 to 1,000 times smaller in size compared to previously demonstrated devices of its kind, acts as a very fast “shutter” to modulate the intensity of the input laser beam and converts a stream of digital bits (“1”s and “0”s) from electrical signals into light pulses.
Source [Gizmag]
supercomputer,supercomputing,laptop form factor,super laptop
Technorati Tags: supercomputer, supercomputing, laptop form factor, super laptop
Leave a Reply