Friday, December 07, 2007
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IBM Advances Supercomputer-On-A-Chip Technology

IBM Advances Supercomputer-On-A-Chip Technology

For companies, it would mean having smaller computers that are far more powerful
than today's machines, yet produce far less heat.

By Antone Gonsalves
InformationWeek
December 6, 2007 06:00 PM
http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=204702120

IBM on Thursday unveiled a technical advancement related to the use of light to
carry large amounts of data quickly among cores within a microprocessor, taking the
company closer to developing a chip that may one day run notebooks with the
horsepower of today's supercomputers.

The breakthrough revolves around a device used to transform electrical impulses into
beams of light. The device, called a modulator, is similar to what's used today in
optical networks built by telecommunication companies. IBM scientists say they have
found a way to shrink the modulator to a size where it can fit within a multi-core
CPU.

The achievement, published in the journal Optics Express, is not all that's needed
to one day bring data-carrying light beams to processors. However, it is an
important first step toward production, which is about 10 to 15 years away, William
Green, lead scientist on the project, told InformationWeek. "We've been working on
this for sometime at IBM, and there's still a lot of work to do," he said. "It's one
of the pieces within this larger network that we're designing and building."

The potential benefits of IBM's work to businesses and consumers are huge. For
companies, it would mean having smaller computers that are far more powerful than
today's machines, yet produce far less heat. Among the problems facing businesses
today are the size and number of servers needed to process an ever-growing amount of
data, which means larger expensive data centers. In addition, today's computers
generate a lot of heat, requiring companies to spend more on power to cool them.

On the consumer side, a supercomputer in a box in the home could handle far more
chores. Those tasks could range from operating lights and heating systems to
processing and distributing video and more realistic computer games, which could
include 3D environments in which characters move about seamlessly.

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Technology
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