North Carolina State University’s Jay Narayan led a research effort to create a computer chip that has enough memory to store all the information in a library. The chip uses nanodots, or nanoscale magnets, which are made of single, defect-free crystals and can be as small as six diameters. The nanodots are integrated directly into a silicon chip. Their precise orientation enables programmers to reliably read and write data to the chips. “We have created magnetic nanodots that store one bit of information on each nanodot, allowing us to store over one billion pages of information in a chip that is one square inch,” Narayan says. He says the chip can be manufactured at an affordable cost. Narayan wants to develop magnetic packaging that would enable lasers or other technologies to interact with the nanodots.
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The European Union-funded ARRIVAL project, a collaboration of researchers from seven European countries, has developed algorithms that can optimize planning and scheduling in complex rail networks. ARRIVAL researchers say their algorithms will enable railways to have more trains, passengers, and goods travel on the same infrastructure, while improving punctuality, passenger satisfaction, and operator profit. “The new timetable, drawn up using the ARRIVAL algorithms, has meant that trains can be scheduled more efficiently and disruptions handled more effectively, while maintaining the usual security measures,” says University of Patras professor Christos Zaroliagis. Two optimized planning approaches led to the efficiency gains. Robust planning involves deploying algorithms to ensure that all parts of the railway network are organized as efficiently as possible. Online planning takes a reactive approach, dealing with disruptions as they happen in real time. Zaroliagis says the technology also has applications in other sectors. “Our algorithms could benefit industrial work-flow systems, e-commerce, P2P, and grid computing networks and even healthcare,” he says.
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The computer industry had an opportunity to learn about the technical details of Google’s infrastructure during LADIS 2009, ACM’s recent SIGOPS International Workshop on Large Scale Distributed Systems and Middleware. Jeff Dean, a Google engineer who was one of the keynote speakers, also talked about Spanner, a new storage and computation system for automating the management of services across multiple data centers. Spanner, which will have a scale of 1 million to 10 million servers in the future, would be capable of automatically allocating resources across “entire fleets of machines,” Dean says. The goal will be “automatic, dynamic, worldwide placement of data and computation to minimize latency or cost.” Spanner also would offer a cost management strategy for addressing regional differences in bandwidth and power costs. Google would have energy management opportunities because Spanner can seamlessly shift workloads between data centers. Automated capacity management also would enable Google to route around failures or data center downtime as well as plan more energy-efficient facilities.

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Defcon founder and organizer Jeff Moss, who was named to the U.S. Homeland Security Advisory Council in June, notes that there is a desire in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other agencies to augment the cybersecurity alert system as well as adopt Web 2.0 technologies. “It goes back to this theme I keep hearing from people there that they need to fully engage in the cyber area with distributing information,” he says. “They want to be more transparent and they want to communicate information faster to broader audiences in different ways. The hang-up seems to be, what are the best ways to do it?” Moss says that DHS has been authorized to hire as many as 1,000 cybersecurity employees over the next three years, but he does not think that specialists are available in such numbers. Moss says agencies’ fierce protection of their bureaucratic fiefdoms plays a part in the U.S. government’s inability to respond adequately to a cyberattack. He acknowledges that the position of cybersecurity czar has been marked by a lot of turnover, and he presents a theory that “the longer you go without a czar the more they realize that maybe they don’t need one, that what they envision what a czar doing, the role is changing.” Moss argues that the position should be one tasked with coordinating intelligence, civilians, and the military. “So it’s probably more important to get the right person and explain the position so they don’t end up with one of these ‘all the responsibilities and none of the authority’ situations, which is what it sounded like, [a] multiple reporting structure with little budget and little staff and no real authority,” he says.

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University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) researchers used computational techniques to produce a roadmap for studying defects in alternative semiconductor materials. They say the findings might lead to new applications for semiconductors, and could help identify alternative materials to use for building a potential quantum computer. “Our results are likely to have an impact on experimental and theoretical research in diverse areas of science and technology, including semiconductor physics, materials science, magnetism, and quantum device engineering,” says UCSB professor David Awschalom. The researchers developed a set of screening criteria to find specific atomic defects in solids that could act as quantum qubits in a quantum computer. Experimental testing of all the potential materials could take decades of research, Awschalom says. However, the UCSB team used computational methods to examine the characteristics of potential defect centers in many different materials, providing guidelines for future experiments. “We tap into the expertise that we have accumulated over the years while examining ‘bad’ defects, and channel it productively into designing ‘good’ defects,” says UCSB professor Chris G. Van de Walle.
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