The Wait Is Over
Let’s say you just got to work and you are booting up your PC, this is where the waiting begins. You have to wait for your hard drive to turn on and get its head in the game. Oh and of course as you are waiting for your system to boot up your boss walks by and definitely notices you sitting there not doing anything. “But it’s not my fault I was waiting for the computer to…” Next thing you know you are putting all your stuff in an empty Hammermill paper box. Well this my friends may be a thing of the past. Japan and the Netherlands teamed up to reinvent the hard drive; a year after its 50th anniversary. The physicists reign from Rabboud University Nijmegen of the Netherlands and Nihon University of Japan. They have devised a way to use lasers to flip the magnetic memory bit in hard drives. Currently, as it is, data is stored on hard drives via magnetic moments that are either in an ‘up’ or ‘down’ position. Then, a certain number of ‘ups’ and ‘downs’ correspond to a binary bit, which then in turn correspond to a piece of data as a whole. An actuator arm with a head at one end and a voice coil on the other control the amount of electricity that gets through the voice coil and on to the platter(the spinning disk inside) which may be spinning at speeds upwards of 15,000RPM. The physicists’ hard drive would use a laser concentrated to 5 micrometers on a piece of magnetic film. The pulse used to flip the bit would be 40 femtoseconds (10-15 s). “Ok, who cares and what does that mean?” Well it means that hard drives will be able to access data 50,000 times faster. Let’s put this in perspective: it takes you 10 minutes to get from your house to the grocery store, now we apply this hard drives speed to your trip now it only takes you 0.012 seconds to get to the store. This is an incredible feat and it is a commercially viable product. If a few minor kinks get worked out, like finding materials with a higher coercivity than the gadolinium, iron, cobalt alloy that they used in the experiments, the hard drives could be on the market in less than 10 years. One of the researchers has already patented the process, he says that anyone could do what they did the only problem would be concentrating a laser to a 50 micrometer spot. By the way 50 micrometers is smaller than the wavelength of the laser itself. So the Hammermill box will soon be a thing of the past, well at least in this instance…
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/30762
Labels: computers, Computing, Electronics, Industry
A Quantum Leap
Yesterday we entered a new era in computing, when
D-wave Systems demonstrated the worlds first quantum computer. The announcement caught some
observers by surprise.
Speculation about quantum computing has been assumed to be something decades away. Some of us wondered if it is even possible. Quantum computers hold the promise of solving complex computations simultaneously instead of the traditional one step at a time. It comes as a big surprise when D-Wave Systems Inc a company near Vancouver announced that they will be demonstrating their new Quantum Computer.
While this is being hailed as a commercially viable project there are
skeptics:
Today, the company was supposed to show off a quantum computer sporting 16-qubits, the most of any quantum computer, commercial or otherwise, but still way too few to do anything important. What's a qubit? Qubits, or quantum bits, are what make quantum computers different from their digital ancestors. A digital bit can be either a one or a zero but not both at the same time. A qubit can. And that lets it do many calculations at once. So quantum computers should be capable of solving certain horrendous problems faster than conventional computers. Certain types of searches, the "traveling salesman" problem, and finding the factors of large integers fall into this category.
At it's heart the D-Wave computer, called Orion, is a chip of niobium that's been cooled to near absolute zero. It relies on a dark-horse technology known as adiabatic quantum computing. It and D-Wave have many critics.
The computer solves only one type of problem, which mathematicians call a two-dimensional Isling model in a magnetic field, but through some software trickery, other problems can be recast as this problem. At the demonstration, they planned to show off its flexibility with two programs. First, they were to show how Orion runs a pattern-matching application that searches a database of molecules. The second could be called the wedding planner's dilemma, in that it is designed to figure out the best seating arrangement for a group of people according to certain constraints, such as Uncle Sam can't sit next to Aunt Jean but has to be at the same table as Grandpa Harry.
Yet, as in any new technology, proof of concept is the biggest step to overcome, and while we may never see quantum computers on our desktops. We can expect them to be more powerful and more commonplace in the near future.
Labels: computers
