A researcher who studied the voting patterns on Amazon.com, the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), and the book review site BookCrossings says a small group of users can easily affect online recommendations. In examining hundreds of thousands of items and millions of votes across the three sites, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) professor Vassilis Kostakos discovered that a small number of people were responsible for most of the ratings. His team found that only five percent of active Amazon users voted on more than 10 products, and a handful made recommendations for hundreds of items. Kostakos believes such voting patterns may not reveal views that represent the overall community, and notes that the results help explain why reviews are often overly negative or overly positive. He believes Web sites could get more users to participate by making it easier to offer reviews. CMU professor Niki Kittur, who was not involved in the project, believes Web sites should summarize a user’s review and other contributions so others could see any obvious biases. A team of IBM Almaden Research Center computer scientists mine the wisdom of online crowds to identify what’s hot on music charts in the September CACM (http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2009/9).

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Memristors were identified by Hewlett-Packard (HP) as the missing link of electronics 18 months ago, and since then the same team of HP researchers has upgraded a standard silicon chip with a layer of memristors to demonstrate that the component can integrate well with existing computing hardware. Like resistors, memristors develop a resistance to electrical current that is proportional to the current passing by at any moment, while also being capable of recalling the last current they experienced. “Each memristor can take the place of seven to 12 transistors,” says HP researcher Stan Williams. Furthermore, the memristor can retain its memory in the absence of power. A memristor’s memory of its last current can be read by observing how it creates a new memory in response to a new current, and these memories are fashioned from a double layer of semiconducting titanium dioxide. “The new hybrid system lifts the data-routing network and the switches out of the [complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS)] plane,” Williams says. “This will greatly free up the space on the CMOS layer for more devices, effectively increasing the density of circuits” without the need for further transistor miniaturization. Williams speculates that similarities between memristive circuits and the behavior of some simple life forms imply that the hybrid devices also could help lead to neuromorphic computing in which computers learn for themselves.

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The Tokyo Institute of Technology (TIT) announced that the TSUBAME 2.0 supercomputer, a green, cloud-based supercomputer system with a top speed of 2.4 petaflops, will begin operation this fall. TSUBAME 2.0 will be built by Hewlett-Packard and NEC using GPGPU computing and will feature a large solid-state drive. TSUBAME 2.0, dubbed Petakon, will be 12 times faster than Japan’s current fastest supercomputer and is expected to achieve a top ranking on the TOP500 list. It also is expected to score high on the DARPA HPC Challenge benchmark and the Green 500 list. TSUBAME 2.0 will feature Intel Westmere-EP and Nehalem-EX processors with scalar operation, and will employ approximately 4,200 NVIDIA Fermi graphics processing units. Petakon also will have more than 1,400 computer nodes and use Voltaire’s QDR InfiniBand network. The operating system will be a combination of Linux and Microsoft Windows HPC, and will use virtual machine technology to provide cloud-hosting services.
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Empa researchers have synthesized complex organic nanowires and attached them together with electrically conducting links, a development that could lead to the production of electronic and optoelectronic components. The researchers say the process for synthesizing organic nanowires is unique in that the substrate temperature, molecule flow, and substrate treatment can be precisely controlled to enable the organic nanowires to develop a previously unattained, perfectly monocrystalline structure. The process includes a step in which the nanowires growing on the surface are ornamented with silver nanoparticles by sputter-coating. The nanoparticles are bombarded with energetic ions, knocking off silver atoms that enter the gas phase and are deposited onto the nanowires. Finally, more nanowires are grown, due to the silver particles’ electrical contact with the original wires, which forms the basis of an electrical circuit on the nanometer scale. “This opens up the possibility of soon being able to manufacture organic semiconductor materials,” says Empa’s Pierangelo Groening.
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The Magellan cloud computing testbed funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is dedicated to studying the advantages and disadvantages, in terms of cost and energy, of the cloud computing model as it applies to scientists working on government-funded initiatives. “What we’re exploring is the question of whether the DOE or other government agencies should be buying their own clusters … or whether those kinds of purchases should be done in a more consolidated way,” says the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Centers’ Kathy Yelick. She says the testbed’s areas of concentration in addition to genomics research will include applied mathematics, high-energy physics, and climate data analysis. In terms of the usefulness of the cloud to scientific computation, Yelick contends that “there’s a part of the workload in scientific computing that’s well-suited to the cloud, but it’s not the [high-performance computing] end, it’s really the bulk aggregate serial workload that often comes up in scientific computing that is not really the traditional arena of high-performance computing.” She observes that one of the findings Magellan has uncovered in its experiments is the fact that performance differences are evident even when operating fairly modest-sized applications across different cloud environments.
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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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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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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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The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center’s John Shalf describes parallel programming languages as tools designed to program systems with multiple processors and thus multiple concurrent instruction threads. He projects that all future computer speed upgrades will be derived from parallelism, as chips’ clock frequencies are no longer increasing. Shalf says that a program that runs in parallel can be created using a sequential programming language, and notes that some of the most commonly used parallel programming strategies exploit the syntax of existing sequential languages. He is concerned “that serial languages do not provide the necessary semantic guarantees about locality of effect that is necessary for efficient parallelism. Ornamenting the language to insert the semantics of such guarantees … is arduous, prone to error, and quite frankly not very intuitive.” Shalf expects a resurgence in implicit parallelism and constructs formulated from functional languages, and says the most important development looking ahead is the migration of parallelism notions from an academic problem to a mainstream challenge. “This means it is even more imperative that we train future computer scientists to solve problems using parallelism from the get-go,” he says.
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Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute have developed Minput, a proof-of-concept miniature input device that provides mouse control and optical tracking for handheld devices. Minput features a 1.5-inch liquid-crystal display taken from a wristwatch originally developed to allow users to watch TV or movies, and two optical sensors. The researchers say Minput can be operated anywhere, including the surface of a table, on a user’s leg, or on the palm of a user’s hand. Users can manipulate Minput and control different programs via gestures such as flicking and twisting. For example, turning it like a knob would adjust the volume and sliding it left and right would change songs. Another modality functions like a virtual window, and users can slide Minput over photographs, text documents, and Web pages to interact with them. Minput also offers cursor control, which functions like a mouse for playing simple games.
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