Scientists at the Tokyo Institute of Technology have made a breakthrough in the effort to uniformly control the orientation of liquid crystal molecules by developing a stable, rewritable memory device that takes advantage of the “anchoring transition” property of liquid crystals. The team was able to align rod-like liquid crystal molecules in a polymer using a laser beam or electrical field. The liquid crystal can store and erase data, and be used repeatedly. “This is the first rewritable memory device utilizing anchoring transition,” says lead researcher Hideo Takezoe. The device also is bi-stable–the liquid crystals retain their orientation in one of two directions–and does not need power to keep images, Takezoe says.
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Improvements to network bandwidth will be for naught unless the Internet’s underlying protocols are updated, says Google’s Urs Holzle. He says that in the next few years the average network speed worldwide will likely expand three-fold from 1.8 Mbps to 5.4 Mbps. Holzle speculates that, according to internal tests at Google, Internet protocols as well as the browser are the reason a disparity exists between what Web page load times should be and what they actually are. Google is attempting to upgrade browser speeds with Google Chrome, which aims to achieve 100 millisecond load times–but this advance cannot come without changes to Net protocols. Google has successfully increased the speed of its search engine by 18 percent without changing the site itself by making “some very modest changes” to the TCP protocol, Holzle says. Meanwhile, Google’s in-development SPDY protocol is designed to reduce Web latency via improvements such as multiplexed streams, request prioritization, and HTTP header compression. Holzle says SPDY can slash packet counts by 40 percent and byte counts by 15 percent.
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European researchers working on the StratusLab project are developing software designed to improve distributed computing infrastructures in an effort to enable research and higher education organizations to pool computing resources. Trinity College Dublin (TCD) researchers are leading the development of a repository of virtual appliances that will make it easier to create grid systems. The virtual appliances repository is designed to facilitate the growth and availability of grid computing for researchers. “The StratusLab toolkit will make the grid easier to manage and will allow grids to tap into commercial cloud services to meet peak demands,” says TCD’s David O’Callaghan. “Later it will allow organizations that already provide a grid service to offer a cloud service to academic users, whilst retaining the many benefits of the grid approach.” The StratusLab project enhances the distributed computing infrastructure ecosystem by simplifying management, adding flexibility, and increasing maintainability, quality, energy efficiency, and resiliency of computing sites.
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