To Create the Perfect Machine, Soldiers Build a Robot Out of Robots

To Create the Perfect Machine, Soldiers Build a Robot Out of Robots | Popular Science@import "/files/css/a1c433465f8fe485195cb11d70c36108.css";@import "/files/css/33f6b7ecb4513ed2fe6c670880a27187.css"; home Login/Register Newsletter Subscribe RSS GadgetsComputersCamerasSmartphonesVideo GamesCarsConceptsHybridsElectric CarsScienceFuture of the EnvironmentEnergyHealthTechnologyMilitaryAviationSpaceRobotsEngineeringDIYProjectsHacksToolsAuto DIYMore From Our Partner: Toolmonger GalleriesVideosColumnsThe GrouseSex FilesGreen Dream Innovation ChallengesHow It WorksFeatures Tweet Digg To Create the Perfect Machine, Soldiers Build a Robot Out of Robots By Clay Dillow Posted 11.08.2011 at 3:49 pm 5 Comments
A Robot Made of Robots via Ares

Over at Fort Benning, soldiers at the Army Expeditionary Warrior Experiment aren’t waiting for military robot makers to come up with the right mix of robotic capabilities. Putting that military penchant for improvisation into practice, soldiers there are mashing up their military robots to give themselves the capabilities they want, piggybacking one robot on top of the other until they get the right mix of gear.

Specifically, soldiers there mounted a TiaLinx Cougar 10 (that’s the robot that can hear your terrified breathing through a concrete wall via radio frequency sensors) on top of a faster and stronger Lockheed Martin Squad Mission Support System (SMSS), a load-bearing unmanned ground vehicle that went to Afghanistan recently for operational testing.

Related ArticlesThis Robot Can Hear Your Frightened Breathing, Even Through WallsA Hexacopter That Sees Motion and Hears Breathing, Even Through WallsHow The First Crowdsourced Military Vehicle Can Remake the Future of Defense ManufacturingTagsTechnology, Clay Dillow, fort benning, lockheed martin, military, military robots, robotics, robots, tialinxThe DIY rig was designed by soldiers at Fort Benning to mitigate some problems they were having with the Cougar 10. While they love the ability to detect a human presence through a wall or obstacle, the Cougar 10 was too slow for teams of soldiers who were trying to quickly sweep and secure multiple buildings. The makeshift solution: piggyback the Cougar 10 aboard the SMSS, which is designed to move at speed and carry up to 600 pounds of payload.

Combined, the two ‘bots performed the mission the soldiers needed it to. But that doesn’t mean a Cougar 10/SMSS blend is a perfect robot by any means. The SMSS is large and loud, unfit for stealthy missions (during another night ambush exercise a SMSS packed with thermal imaging gave away a unit’s position with its engine noise). On the other hand, the Cougar 10 is designed to help soldiers get the drop on their enemies.

But for the mission at hand--sweeping and clearing a series of buildings--it was the right robot for the job. The fact that soldiers were able to quickly build their own customized robot out of robots is cool, both in terms of crafty DIY ingenuity and in terms of the future of modular military robot design.

[Ares]

Previous Article: Bell Labs's Nethead Makes Telepresence Robots Affordable for AllNext Article: Video: A Steerable Remote 'Telexistence' Robot that Transmits Sight, Sound, and Touch to the Operator 5 Comments Link to this comment beantown179 11/08/11 at 6:06 pm

Wait if we let soldiers do this then how will the defense contractors make all their money?

Link to this comment JediMindset 11/08/11 at 6:14 pm

sadly they wouldn't be giving the soldiers the credit and they pay check. think about it this way, soldiers just follow orders. that's their job. so another "superior" telling them to hand over their creations is just another mission.

_________________
The people of the world only divide into two kinds, One sort with brains who hold no religion, The other with religion and no brain.

- Abu-al-Ala al-Marri

Link to this comment tcolguin 11/08/11 at 7:10 pm

If you are working for a company and build a new robot, you don't get it either, it is the companies not yours. Nothing different here.

Link to this comment WhittyMike 11/09/11 at 2:21 pm

These are

the droids we've been looking for...

Link to this comment Zreiser 11/09/11 at 11:21 pm

Yo dawg, I heard you liked robots, so we put a robot on your robot, built out of other robots to help make even more robots for your robots!

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November 2011: Data Is Power

This month, we examine all the ways information is driving our future, from dating to crime to how we see the world.

Plus: turning your smartphone into a wallet, BMW's electric cars, and a space heater with no fan.

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Popular on Popsci Most Viewed TechnologyGallery: A History of Data TheftGallery: A Glass Astronomical Database Goes Digital Gallery: When the Best Tool Is an AnimalArchive Gallery: The Power of Data Most Emailed TechnologyWhen the Best Tool for the Job Is an AnimalGallery: When the Best Tool Is an AnimalVideo: Kinect Provides the Seeing Eye in a Robotic Guide Dog for the BlindNew Super-Black Material Absorbs 99 Percent of All Light That Dares to Strike ItRussia's Phobos-Grunt Mission to Mars is Stuck in Earth Orbit After Engines Fail to FireTo Create the Perfect Machine, Soldiers Build a Robot Out of RobotsVideo: A Steerable Remote 'Telexistence' Robot that Transmits Sight, Sound, and Touch to the OperatorHome 3-D Viewing Equipment Is Getting Smaller and Smaller and SmallerBell Labs's Nethead Makes Telepresence Robots Affordable for AllDoctor Offers Laser Treatment to Permanently Make Brown Eyes Blue Most Commented TechnologyTo Find Alien Cities, Look for City Lights on Distant PlanetsA Texas Sheriff's Department is Launching an Unmanned Helodrone that Could Carry WeaponsThe Unsplittable BitDoctor Offers Laser Treatment to Permanently Make Brown Eyes BlueNew Super-Black Material Absorbs 99 Percent of All Light That Dares to Strike ItThe Glory of Big DataRussia's Phobos-Grunt Mission to Mars is Stuck in Earth Orbit After Engines Fail to FireTo Keep a Steady Stream of Satellites Going Up, DARPA Wants to Launch Them from AirplanesGround-Based Laser Cannon to Turn Space Debris into Self-Powered Flaming De-Orbiting RocketsThe Greatest Data Thefts in History Name Address 1   City State STATE Alabama Alaska Arizona Arkansas California Colorado Connecticut Delaware DC Florida Georgia Hawaii Idaho Illinois Indiana Iowa Kansas Kentucky Louisiana Maine Maryland Massachusetts Michigan Minnesota Mississippi Missouri Montana Nebraska Nevada New Hampshire New Jersey New Mexico New York N. Carolina N. Dakota Ohio Oklahoma Oregon Pennsylvania Rhode Island S. Carolina S. Dakota Tennessee Texas Utah Vermont Virginia Washington W. Virginia Wisconsin Wyoming Zip Code Email Today on PopSci.com The Ten Most Amazing Databases in the World581101211Can Technology Save the Military From a Data Deluge?582371213See The Data-Centric Universe, Then and Now582431214The Santa Cruz Experiment: Can a City's Crime Be Predicted and Prevented?576731215The Glory of Big Data577221216The Most Amazing Science Images of the Week, October 24-28580521217Archive Gallery: The Telephone580511218Gallery: Last Night's Auroras as They Appeared from Across the Hemisphere579731219iPhone 4S Review: Apple's Restraint5798512110Inside the DIY Weapons Workshop of the Libyan Rebels5792612111Archive Gallery: Classic Thrill Rides and Carnival Attractions5776612112 Footer Menu Subscribe to the Print EditionSubscribe to the Digital EditionRenew SubscriptionCustomer ServiceSite MapAbout UsContact UsAdvertisingPrivacy PolicyTerms of UseAbuseRSS FeedsPS Showcase

 

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Scientists study 'galaxy zoo' using Google Maps and thousands of volunteers

ScienceDaily (Nov. 3, 2011) — The reddest galaxies with the largest central bulb show the largest bars -- gigantic central columns of stars and dark matter -- according to a scientific study that used Google Maps to observe the sky. A group of volunteers of more than 200,000 participants of the galaxy classification project Galaxy Zoo contributed to this research.

More than two thirds of spiral galaxies, including our own Milky Way, display a central bar that can extend for thousands of light years. These colossal elongated structures are made up of collections of stars and dark matter which are held together by gravity.

Now a team of researchers from Europe and the USA have measured the bar length of some 5000 galaxies with the help of amateur astronomers. The most precise results (those obtained for 3150 galaxies) have been published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The study comes under the Galaxy Zoo project, a citizen science initiative in which more than 200,000 volunteers assisted in classifying a million galaxies through images provided by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey astronomical catalogue. As for the bars, 150 amateur astronomers have recorded their observations on a webpage specifically created for this purpose. The page is currently still active despite being closed to any further data entry.

Ben Hoyle, researcher at the Institute of Cosmos Sciences (University of Barcelona, Spain) and coordinator of the study, stresses that "this webpage combines Galaxy Zoo classifications with Google Maps technology." More precisely, the team has used the Google Maps Sky interface which allows to see the sky, especially the galaxies, as seen from Earth's surface.

The redness of bars

"In this way we have compiled some 16,000 measurements of the bars of 5000 galaxies, which is a sample a hundred times greater than previous ones. We have also come to many different conclusions, such as the fact that redder galaxies, which are stopping star formation, have longer bars," says Hoyle.

In the electromagnetic spectrum, the colour red comes from older, cooler stars whereas the colour blue is linked to hotter and younger stars. The study also reveals that the bars tend to be redder than the rest of the galaxy, which indicates that they have an older stellar population.

Other conclusions indicate that those galaxies with a larger bulb (a central agglomeration of stars) have longer bars. In addition, barred galaxies are more likely to display spiral arms than unbarred galaxies.

The images provide examples of barred galaxies with spiral arms. In the first row, the arms are connected to the ring around the bar. In the second row, the arms are connected at the end of the bar and the third row shows a mixture of the two. Image: Ben Hoyle et al./Galaxy Zoo.

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Ben Hoyle, Karen. L. Masters, Robert C. Nichol, Edward M. Edmondson, Arfon M. Smith, Chris Lintott, Ryan Scranton, Steven Bamford, Kevin Schawinski, Daniel Thomas. Galaxy Zoo: bar lengths in local disc galaxies. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2011; 415 (4): 3627 DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2966.2011.18979.x

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Ancient lunar dynamo may explain magnetized moon rocks

ScienceDaily (Nov. 9, 2011) — The presence of magnetized rocks on the surface of the moon, which has no global magnetic field, has been a mystery since the days of the Apollo program. Now a team of scientists has proposed a novel mechanism that could have generated a magnetic field on the moon early in its history.

The "geodynamo" that generates Earth's magnetic field is powered by heat from the inner core, which drives complex fluid motions in the molten iron of the outer core. But the moon is too small to support that type of dynamo, according to Christina Dwyer, a graduate student in Earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In the Nov. 10 issue of Nature, Dwyer and her coauthors--planetary scientists Francis Nimmo at UC Santa Cruz and David Stevenson at the California Institute of Technology--describe how an ancient lunar dynamo could have arisen from stirring of the moon's liquid core driven by the motion of the solid mantle above it.

"This is a very different way of powering a dynamo that involves physical stirring, like stirring a bowl with a giant spoon," Dwyer said.

Dwyer and her coauthors calculated the effects of differential motion between the moon's core and mantle. Early in its history, the moon orbited Earth at a much closer distance than it does today, and it continues to gradually recede from Earth. At close distances, tidal interactions between Earth and the moon caused the moon's mantle to rotate slightly differently than the core. This differential motion of the mantle relative to the core stirred the liquid core, creating fluid motions that, in theory, could give rise to a magnetic dynamo.

"The moon wobbles a bit as it spins--that's called precession--but the core is liquid, and it doesn't do exactly the same precession. So the mantle is moving back and forth across the core, and that stirs up the core, " explained Nimmo, a professor of Earth and planetary sciences at UCSC.

The researchers found that a lunar dynamo could have operated in this way for at least a billion years. Eventually, however, it would have stopped working as the moon got farther away from Earth. "The further out the moon moves, the slower the stirring, and at a certain point the lunar dynamo shuts off," Dwyer said.

Rocks can become magnetized from the shock of an impact, a mechanism some scientists have proposed to explain the magnetization of lunar samples. But recent paleomagnetic analyses of moon rocks, as well as orbital measurements of the magnetization of the lunar crust, suggest that there was a strong, long-lived magnetic field on the moon early in its history.

"One of the nice things about our model is that it explains how a lunar dynamo could have lasted for a billion years," Nimmo said. "It also makes predictions about how the strength of the field should have changed over the years, and that's potentially testable with enough paleomagnetic observations."

More detailed analysis is needed, however, to show that stirring of the core by the mantle would create the right kind of fluid motions to generate a magnetic field. "Only certain types of fluid motions give rise to magnetic dynamos," Dwyer said. "We calculated the power that's available to drive the dynamo and the magnetic field strengths that could be generated. But we really need the dynamo experts to take this model to the next level of detail and see if it works."

A working model of a lunar dynamo, combined with more detailed paleomagnetic analysis of moon rocks, could give scientists a powerful tool for investigating the history of the moon, Dwyer said. In addition, the study presents a novel mechanism for generating a magnetic field not only on the moon, but also on other small bodies, including large asteroids.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of California - Santa Cruz. The original article was written by Tim Stephens.

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Journal Reference:

C. A. Dwyer, D. J. Stevenson, F. Nimmo. A long-lived lunar dynamo driven by continuous mechanical stirring. Nature, 2011; 479 (7372): 212 DOI: 10.1038/nature10564

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Volunteers end simulated mission to Mars

ScienceDaily (Nov. 6, 2011) — The record-breaking simulated mission to Mars has ended with smiling faces after 17 months. Mars500's six brave volunteers stepped out of their 'spacecraft' Nov. 4, 2011 to be welcomed by the waiting scientists -- happy that the venture had worked even better than expected.

Mars500, the first full-length, high-fidelity simulation of a human mission to our neighbouring planet, started 520 days ago, on 3 June 2010, at the Institute of Biomedical Problems in Moscow.

The international crew were isolated in their interplanetary spacecraft mock-up, faithfully following the phases of a real mission: a long flight to Mars, insertion into orbit around the planet, landing, surface exploration, return to orbit, a monotonous return flight and arrival at Earth.

During the 'flight', the crew performed more than 100 experiments, all linked to the problems of long-duration missions in deep space.

To add to their isolation, communications with mission control were artificially delayed to mimic the natural delays over the great distances on a real Mars flight.

The crew of three Russians, one Chinese and two Europeans have performed exceptionally well. They have kept together and showed that motivation and team spirit can keep humans going under very difficult conditions. Scientists are pleased at their exceptional discipline.

"Thank you very much for your outstanding effort," said the European Space Agency's Director General Jean-Jacques Dordain in his greeting from Paris after the crew stepped from their module.

"I welcome the courage, determination and generosity of these young people who have devoted almost two years of their lives to this project, for the progress of human space exploration."

Touching reunions

The hatch was opened at 14:00 local time (11:00 CET, 10:00 GMT) and the 'marsonauts' walked out from their modules and greeted the mission directors.

After their first taste of freedom, they were led to meet doctors and their families and close friends.

"It is great to see you all again," said Diego Urbina, ESA's Italian crewmember, after emerging.

"On the Mars500 mission we have accomplished on Earth the longest space voyage ever so that humankind can one day greet a new dawn on a distant but reachable planet.

"And, as a European Space Agency crewmember, I am honoured to have been part of this remarkable challenge together with five of the most professional, friendly and resilient individuals I have ever worked with.

"I'll be forever thankful to those who, even from a distance, always stood close to me during this space odyssey."

Romain Charles, ESA's French crewmember, noted: "One year and a half ago, I was selected by the European Space Agency to be part of the Mars500 crew. Today, after a motionless trip of 520 days, I'm proud to prove, with my international crewmates, that a human journey to the Red Planet is feasible.

"We have all acquired a lot of valuable experience that will help in designing and planning future missions to Mars.

"We're ready to embark on the next spaceship going there!"

During their first few days of liberty, the crew will undergo extensive medical checks and psychological evaluation. They will also enjoy some private time and relaxation before talking to the media on 8 November in Moscow.

Their mission continues into early December, as they go through an exhaustive series of debriefings, tests and evaluations to collect the mission's final data.

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Engineers solve energy puzzle: How energy levels align in a critical group of advanced materials

ScienceDaily (Nov. 6, 2011) — University of Toronto materials science and engineering (MSE) researchers have demonstrated for the first time the key mechanism behind how energy levels align in a critical group of advanced materials. This discovery is a significant breakthrough in the development of sustainable technologies such as dye-sensitized solar cells and organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs).

Transition metal oxides, which are best-known for their application as super-conductors, have made possible many sustainable technologies developed over the last two decades, including organic photovoltaics and organic light-emitting diodes. While it is known that these materials make excellent electrical contacts in organic-based devices, it wasn't known why -- until now.

In research published in Nature Materials, MSE PhD Candidate Mark T. Greiner and Professor Zheng-Hong Lu, Canada Research Chair (Tier I) in Organic Optoelectronics, lay out the blueprint that conclusively establishes the principle of energy alignment at the interface between transition metal oxides and organic molecules.

"The energy-level of molecules on materials surfaces is like a massive jigsaw puzzle that has challenged the scientific community for a very long time," says Professor Lu. "There have been a number of suggested theories with many critical links missing. We have been fortunate to successfully build these links to finally solve this decades-old puzzle."

With this piece of the puzzle solved, this discovery could enable scientists and engineers to design simpler and more efficient organic solar cells and OLEDs to further enhance sustainable technologies and help secure our energy future.

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Mark T. Greiner, Michael G. Helander, Wing-Man Tang, Zhi-Bin Wang, Jacky Qiu, Zheng-Hong Lu. Universal energy-level alignment of molecules on metal oxides. Nature Materials, 2011; DOI: 10.1038/nmat3159

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Incredible shrinking material: Engineers reveal how scandium trifluoride contracts with heat

ScienceDaily (Nov. 7, 2011) — They shrink when you heat 'em. Most materials expand when heated, but a few contract. Now engineers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have figured out how one of these curious materials, scandium trifluoride (ScF3), does the trick -- a finding, they say, that will lead to a deeper understanding of all kinds of materials.

The researchers, led by graduate student Chen Li, published their results in the November 4 issue of Physical Review Letters (PRL).

Materials that don't expand under heat aren't just an oddity. They're useful in a variety of applications -- in mechanical machines such as clocks, for example, that have to be extremely precise. Materials that contract could counteract the expansion of more conventional ones, helping devices remain stable even when the heat is on.

"When you heat a solid, most of the heat goes into the vibrations of the atoms," explains Brent Fultz, professor of materials science and applied physics and a coauthor of the paper. In normal materials, this vibration causes atoms to move apart and the material to expand. A few of the known shrinking materials, however, have unique crystal structures that cause them to contract when heated, a property called negative thermal expansion. But because these crystal structures are complicated, scientists have not been able to clearly see how heat -- in the form of atomic vibrations -- could lead to contraction.

But in 2010 researchers discovered negative thermal expansion in ScF3, a powdery substance with a relatively simple crystal structure. To figure out how its atoms vibrated under heat, Li, Fultz, and their colleagues used a computer to simulate each atom's quantum behavior. The team also probed the material's properties by blasting it with neutrons at the Spallation Neutron Source at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee; by measuring the angles and speeds with which the neutrons scattered off the atoms in the crystal lattice, the team could study the atoms' vibrations. The more the material is heated the more it contracts, so by doing this scattering experiment at increasing temperatures, the team learned how the vibrations changed as the material shrank.

The results paint a clear picture of how the material shrinks, the researchers say. You can imagine the bound scandium and fluorine atoms as balls attached to one another with springs. The lighter fluorine atom is linked to two heavier scandium atoms on opposite sides. As the temperature is cranked up, all the atoms jiggle in many directions. But because of the linear arrangement of the fluorine and two scandiums, the fluorine vibrates more in directions perpendicular to the springs. With every shake, the fluorine pulls the scandium atoms toward each other. Since this happens throughout the material, the entire structure shrinks.

The surprise, the researchers say, was that in the large fluorine vibrations, the energy in the springs is proportional to the atom's displacement -- how far the atom moves while shaking -- raised to the fourth power, a behavior known as a quartic oscillation. Most materials are dominated by quadratic (or harmonic) oscillations -- characteristic of the typical back-and-forth motion of springs and pendulums -- in which the stored energy is proportional to the square of the displacement.

"A nearly pure quantum quartic oscillator has never been seen in atom vibrations in crystals," Fultz says. Many materials have a little bit of quartic behavior, he explains, but their quartic tendencies are pretty small. In the case of ScF3, however, the team observed the quartic behavior very clearly. "A pure quartic oscillator is a lot of fun," he says. "Now that we've found a case that's very pure, I think we know where to look for it in many other materials." Understanding quartic oscillator behavior will help engineers design materials with unusual thermal properties. "In my opinion," Fultz says, "that will be the biggest long-term impact of this work."

The other authors of the PRL paper, "The structural relationship between negative thermal expansion and quartic anharmonicity of cubic ScF3," are former Caltech postdoctoral scholars Xiaoli Tang and J. Brandon Keith; Caltech graduate students Jorge Muñoz and Sally Tracy; and Doug Abernathy of ORNL. The research was supported by the Department of Energy.

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Nine new gamma pulsars brings known gamma-ray pulsars to over 100

ScienceDaily (Nov. 3, 2011) — Pulsars are the lighthouses of the universe. These compact and fast-rotating neutron stars flash many times per second in the radio or gamma-ray band. Pure gamma-ray pulsars are extremely difficult to find despite their high energy because they radiate very few photons per unit of time. Using an improved analysis algorithm, Max Planck scientists and international partners have now discovered a number of previously unknown gamma-ray pulsars with low luminosity in data from the Fermi satellite. These pulsars had been missed using conventional methods. The number of known gamma-ray pulsars has thus grown to over 100.

The paper will be published in the Astrophysical Journal.

These cosmic beacons still pose a few puzzles for scientists: not all radio pulsars can be identified as gamma-ray pulsars and, on the other hand, not all gamma-ray pulsars are "visible" in the radio band. A plausible explanation is the varying width of the light cone over the wavelength range. This may be because emissions at different wavelengths spread out differently. Lower-energy radio waves are bundled more tightly at the magnetic pole of a neutron star field while the cone of high-energy gamma-rays will spread out. Depending on its spatial orientation and intensity of the cone, a pulsar will thus be observed as a radio and/or gamma-ray pulsar. However, other models also describe this phenomenon. To determine the actual cause, as many sources as possible should be examined.

The search for pure gamma-ray pulsars literally starts with the scientists "in the dark." A typical pulsar will rotate several times per second, or at least 108 times per year. Its emission region will sweep across the observer with that frequency. The Large Area Telescope (LAT) on NASA's Fermi satellite however only detects an average of a few thousand photons per year from any given gamma pulsar. This low detection rate makes it extremely difficult for even the fastest supercomputers to assign the individual gamma quanta to an unknown pulsar with a defined rotation period.

For several months, scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute/AEI) in Hanover, the Leibniz University of Hanover and the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn analysed data from the LAT in an international collaboration. Using a new method, they have been able to identify nine new pulsars which were "invisible" up to now.

"We used a new kind of hierarchical algorithm which we had originally developed for the search for gravitational waves," explains Bruce Allen, Director at the AEI and professor at the Institute for Gravitational Physics of the Leibniz University Hanover. "It's like digging for diamonds or gold: it's very exciting when you find something," Allen continues.

The nine new pulsars netted by the scientists emit less gamma radiation than those previously known and rotate between three and twelve times per second. Only one of these pulsars was later also found to emit radio waves. The total number of gamma pulsars observed by Fermi has thus risen to over 100.

About three-quarters of the gamma pulsars previously observed by Fermi had first been identified as radio pulsars. In these cases the search for additional gamma radiation is relatively easy. Sky position, rotation period and rotation period change rate are all derived from the radio data, so it takes only a few additional calculations to determine whether detected gamma quanta match a particular set of parameters or not.

A blind search is far more complex as neither position nor pulse period and its change over time are known. At first, each photon from a particular observation sector is assigned a certain probability for a sky position. If a significant accumulation of gamma quanta is observed from a rough direction in the sky, scientists check if the photon's arrival time at Fermi's on-board detector matches an exact sky position and pulse period and its change over time. However, with only a few thousand photons detected over a period of three years but rotation frequencies of only a few hertz, a huge number of prospects have to be tested.

During a first blind search in Fermi data, astronomers found 24 pure gamma pulsars within one year of the launch of the satellite in 2008. A further two were discovered in the following year. After that, the number of new pulsars found stagnated until physicists from Hanover started searching with an algorithm that is 10 times more efficient, and employing additional computing power. They found a further nine gamma-ray pulsars which on average emit only one quarter of the photons compared to previously discovered pure gamma-ray pulsars.

Scientists at the MPI Bonn examined the emission spectra of the corresponding gamma-ray sources to see whether they were candidates for the gamma-ray pulsar blind search. "About one-third of the gamma-ray sources observed by LAT were unknown before the launch of Fermi," says Lucas Guillemot, a member of the research group of Michael Kramer, Director at the MPIfR. "We determined the spectral properties of the Fermi LAT sources, and compared them to those of known gamma-ray sources," he said.

The candidates for a gamma-ray pulsar blind search were then analysed in detail. "The new computing method permits us to evaluate data sets much faster than before," said Holger Pletsch, a member of Allen's group leading the work. The analysis was also run on the ATLAS computing cluster at the AEI in Hanover. ATLAS has one hundred times the computing power that was used in previous blind searches. "Together with the more efficient analysis, this does not only mean that we can analyse the data much faster. We can now search for gamma-ray pulsars which rotate even faster, with periods measured in milliseconds," adds Pletsch. The computing power needed for the search increases proportionally to the cube of the rotation period.

Additionally, part of the computing power of the Einstein@Home project is now allocated to the search for the first pure gamma-ray millisecond-pulsar. This discovery would be a significant contribution to our understanding of pulsars.

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H. J. Pletsch, L. Guillemot, B. Allen, M. Kramer, C. Aulbert, H. Fehrmann, P. S. Ray, E. D. Barr, A. Belfiore, F. Camilo, P. A. Caraveo, O. Celik, D. J. Champion, M. Dormody, R. P. Eatough, E. C. Ferrara, P. C. C. Freire, J. W. T. Hessels, M. Keith, M. Kerr, A. de Luca, A. G. Lyne, M. Marelli, M. A. McLaughlin, D. Parent, S. M. Ransom, M. Razzano, W. Reich, P. M. Saz Parkinson, B. W. Stappers, M. T. Wolff. Discovery of Nine Gamma-Ray Pulsars in Fermi-LAT Data Using a New Blind Search Method. Astrophysical Journal, 2011 [link]

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Fundamental discovery casts enzymes in new light

ScienceDaily (Nov. 9, 2011) — A tree outside Oak Ridge National Laboratory researcher Pratul Agarwal's office window provided the inspiration for a discovery that may ultimately lead to drugs with fewer side effects, less expensive biofuels and more.

Just as a breeze causes leaves, branches and ultimately the tree to move, enzymes moving at the molecular level perform hundreds of chemical processes that have a ripple effect necessary for life. Previously, protein complexes were viewed as static entities with biological function understood in terms of direct interactions, but that isn't the case. This finding, recently published in PLoS Biology, may have enormous implications.

"Our discovery is allowing us to perhaps find the knobs that we can use to improve the catalytic rate of enzymes and perform a host of functions more efficiently," said Agarwal, a member of the Department of Energy laboratory's Computer Science and Mathematics Division.

Making this discovery possible was ORNL's supercomputer, Jaguar, which allowed Agarwal and co-author Arvind Ramanathan to investigate a large number of enzymes at the atomistic scale.

The researchers found that enzymes have similar features that are entirely preserved from the smallest living organism -- bacteria -- to complex life forms, including humans.

"If something is important for function, then it will be present in the protein performing the same function across different species," Agarwal said. "For example, regardless of which company makes a car, they all have wheels and brakes."

Similarly, scientists have known for decades that certain structural features of the enzyme are also preserved because of their important function. Agarwal and Ramanathan believe the same is true for enzyme flexibility.

"The importance of the structure of enzymes has been known for more than 100 years, but only recently have we started to understand that the internal motions may be the missing piece of the puzzle to understand how enzymes work," Agarwal said. "If we think of the tree as the model, the protein move at the molecular level with the side-chain and residues being the leaves and the protein backbone being the entire stem."

This research builds on previous work in which Agarwal identified a network of protein vibrations in the enzyme Cyclphilin A, which is involved in many biological reactions, including AIDS-causing HIV-1.

While Agarwal sees this research perhaps leading to medicines able to target hard to cure diseases such as AIDS, he is also excited about its energy applications, specifically in the area of cellulosic ethanol. Highly efficient enzymes could bring down the cost of biofuels, making them a more attractive option.

Funding for this research was provided by ORNL's Laboratory Directed Research and Development program. Ramanathan was a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University when this work began and now also works at ORNL. The paper is titled "Evolutionarily conserved linkage between enzyme fold, flexibility and catalysis."

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Journal Reference:

Arvind Ramanathan, Pratul K. Agarwal. Evolutionarily Conserved Linkage between Enzyme Fold, Flexibility, and Catalysis. PLoS Biology, 2011; 9 (11): e1001193 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1001193

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Video: A Steerable Remote 'Telexistence' Robot that Transmits Sight, Sound, and Touch to the Operator

Keio University researchers are taking telepresence to the next logical level with a new “telexistence” robot called TELESAR V, a robotic platform that doesn’t just transport the user's eyes to another location, but also his or her ears and hands as well. The idea is to break through the limitations of time and space to allow a user to actually feel like he or she is present elsewhere via a remotely operated robot that returns three sensory stimuli back to the user.

Using a head-mounted 3-D visual display, an audio system that streams sound to the user, and tactile gloves that allow the user to feel the shapes and temperatures of objects--currently the robots force vector and temp sensors can accurately relay textures as fine as the unevenness on the surface of a Lego block--the user can manipulate the robot remotely and feel what the robot feels. The designers are looking for a true avatar sensation, one that makes the user really feel that he or she is inhabiting the place of the robot.

This certainly isn’t the first time we’ve seen or heard of this kind of concept, but it is one of the first all around implementations of so much telepresence technology in a single package that--by all appearances--seems to work really well. And there’s no need to take our word for it; see TELESAR V in action below.

[DigInfo]

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Not one, not two, not three, but four clones: First quantum cloning machine to produce four copies

ScienceDaily (Nov. 6, 2011) — Xi-Jun Ren and Yang Xiang from Henan Universities in China, in collaboration with Heng Fan at the Institute of Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, have produced a theory for a quantum cloning machine able to produce several copies of the state of a particle at atomic or sub-atomic scale, or quantum state, in an article about to be published in The European Physical Journal D. The advance could have implications for quantum information processing methods used, for example, in message encryption systems.

Quantum cloning is difficult because quantum mechanics laws only allow for an approximate copy—not an exact copy—of an original quantum state to be made, as measuring such a state prior to its cloning would alter it.

In this study, researchers have demonstrated that it is theoretically possible to create four approximate copies of an initial quantum state, in a process called asymmetric cloning. The authors have extended previous work that was limited to quantum cloning providing only two or three copies of the original state. One key challenge was that the quality of the approximate copy decreases as the number of copies increases.

The authors were able to optimise the quality of the cloned copies, thus yielding four good approximations of the initial quantum state. They have also demonstrated that their quantum cloning machine has the advantage of being universal and therefore is able to work with any quantum state, ranging from a photon to an atom.

Assymetric quantum cloning has applications in analysing the security of messages encryption systems, based on shared secret quantum keys. Two people will know whether their communication is secure by analysing the quality of each copy of their secret key. Any third party trying to gain knowledge of that key would be detected as measuring it would disturb the state of that key.

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Journal Reference:

X. J. Ren, Y. Xiang, H. Fan. Optimal asymmetric 1 ? 4 quantum cloning in arbitrary dimension. The European Physical Journal D, 2011; DOI: 10.1140/epjd/e2011-20370-2

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NASA's Fermi finds youngest millisecond pulsar, 100 pulsars to-date

ScienceDaily (Nov. 3, 2011) — An international team of scientists using NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has discovered a surprisingly powerful millisecond pulsar that challenges existing theories about how these objects form.

At the same time, another team has located nine new gamma-ray pulsars in Fermi data, using improved analytical techniques.

A pulsar is a type of neutron star that emits electromagnetic energy at periodic intervals. A neutron star is the closest thing to a black hole that astronomers can observe directly, crushing half a million times more mass than Earth into a sphere no larger than a city. This matter is so compressed that even a teaspoonful weighs as much as Mount Everest.

"With this new batch of pulsars, Fermi now has detected more than 100, which is an exciting milestone when you consider that, before Fermi's launch in 2008, only seven of them were known to emit gamma rays," said Pablo Saz Parkinson, an astrophysicist at the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics at the University of California Santa Cruz, and a co-author on two papers detailing the findings.

One group of pulsars combines incredible density with extreme rotation. The fastest of these so-called millisecond pulsars whirls at 43,000 revolutions per minute.

Millisecond pulsars are thought to achieve such speeds because they are gravitationally bound in binary systems with normal stars. During part of their stellar lives, gas flows from the normal star to the pulsar. Over time, the impact of this falling gas gradually spins up the pulsar's rotation.

The strong magnetic fields and rapid rotation of pulsars cause them to emit powerful beams of energy, from radio waves to gamma rays. Because the star is transferring rotational energy to the pulsar, the pulsar's spin eventually slows as the star loses matter.

Typically, millisecond pulsars are around a billion years old. However, in the Nov. 3 issue of Science, the Fermi team reveals a bright, energetic millisecond pulsar only 25 million years old.

The object, named PSR J1823-3021A, lies within NGC 6624, a spherical collection of ancient stars called a globular cluster, one of about 160 similar objects that orbit our galaxy. The cluster is about 10 billion years old and lies about 27,000 light-years away toward the constellation Sagittarius.

Fermi's Large Area Telescope (LAT) showed that eleven globular clusters emit gamma rays, the cumulative emission of dozens of millisecond pulsars too faint for even Fermi to detect individually. But that's not the case for NGC 6624.

"It's amazing that all of the gamma rays we see from this cluster are coming from a single object. It must have formed recently based on how rapidly it's emitting energy. It's a bit like finding a screaming baby in a quiet retirement home," said Paulo Freire, the study's lead author, at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany.

J1823-3021A was previously identified as a pulsar by its radio emission, yet of the nine new pulsars, none are millisecond pulsars, and only one was later found to emit radio waves.

Despite its sensitivity, Fermi's LAT may detect only one gamma ray for every 100,000 rotations of some of these faint pulsars. Yet new analysis techniques applied to the precise position and arrival time of photons collected by the LAT since 2008 were able to identify them.

"We adapted methods originally devised for studying gravitational waves to the problem of finding gamma-ray pulsars, and we were quickly rewarded," said Bruce Allen, director of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Hannover, Germany. Allen co-authored a paper on the discoveries that was published online in The Astrophysical Journal.

Allen also directs the Einstein@Home project, a distributed computing effort that uses downtime on computers of volunteers to process astronomical data. In July, the project extended the search for gamma-ray pulsars to the general public by including Femi LAT data in the work processed by Einstein@Home users.

NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is an astrophysics and particle physics partnership. It is managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. It was developed in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy, with important contributions from academic institutions and partners in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden and the United States.

For more information, images and animations, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/fermi

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2-D electron liquid solidifies in a magnetic field

ScienceDaily (Nov. 5, 2011) — Physicists from the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a theory that describes, in a unified manner, the coexistence of liquid and pinned solid phases of electrons in two dimensions under the influence of a magnetic field. The theory also describes the transition between these phases as the field is varied. The theoretical predictions by Constantine Yannouleas and Uzi Landman, from Georgia Tech's School of Physics, aim to explain and provide insights into the origins of experimental findings published last year by a team of researchers from Princeton, Florida State and Purdue universities.

The research appears in the Oct. 27 edition of the journal Physical Review B.

The experimental discovery in 1982 of a new Hall conductance step at a fraction ?=1/m with m=3, that is at (1/3)e2/h (with more conductance steps, at other m, found later) -- where h is the Planck constant and e is the electron charge -- was made for two-dimensional electrons at low temperatures and strong magnetic fields and was greeted with great surprise. The theoretical explanation of this finding a year later by Robert Laughlin in terms of a new form of a quantum fluid, earned him and the experimentalists Horst Störmer and Daniel Tsui the 1998 Nobel Prize with the citation "for the discovery of a new form of quantum fluid with fractionally charged excitations." These discoveries represent conceptual breakthroughs in the understanding of matter, and the fractional quantum Hall effect (FQHE) liquid states, originating from the highly correlated nature of the electrons in these systems, have been termed as new states of matter.

"The quantum fluid state at the 1/3 primary fraction is the hallmark of the FQHE, whose theoretical understanding has been formulated around the antithesis between a new form of quantum fluid and the pinned Wigner crystal," said Landman, Regents' and Institute Professor in the School of Physics, F.E. Callaway Chair and director of the Center for Computational Materials Science (CCMS) at Georgia Tech. "Therefore, the discovery of pinned crystalline signatures in the neighborhood of the 1/3 FQHE fraction, measured as resonances in the microwave spectrum of the two-dimensional electron gas and reported in the Physical Review Letters in September 2010 by a group of researchers headed by Daniel Tsui, was rather surprising," he added.

Indeed, formation of a hexagonally ordered two-dimensional electron solid phase, a so called Wigner crystal (WC) named after the Nobel laureate physicist Eugene Wigner who predicted its existence in 1934, has been anticipated for smaller quantum Hall fractional fillings, ?, of the lowest Landau level populated by the electrons at high magnetic fields, for example ? = 1/9, 1/7 and even 1/5. However, the electrons in the ?=1/3 fraction were believed to resist crystallization and remain liquid.

The Georgia Tech physicists developed a theoretical formalism that, in conjunction with exact numerical solutions, provides a unified microscopic approach to the interplay between FQHE liquid and Wigner solid states in the neighborhood of the 1/3 fractional filling. A major advantage of their approach is the use of a single class of variational wave functions for description of both the quantum liquid and solid phases.

"Liquid characteristics of the fractional quantum Hall effect states are associated with symmetry-conserving vibrations and rotations of the strongly interacting electrons and they coexist with intrinsic correlations that are crystalline in nature," Senior Research Scientist Yannouleas and Landman wrote in the opening section of their paper. "While the electron densities of the fractional quantum Hall effect liquid state do not exhibit crystalline patterns, the intrinsic crystalline correlations which they possess are reflected in the emergence of a sequence of liquid states of enhanced stability, called cusp states, that correspond in the thermodynamic limit to the fractional quantum Hall effect filling fractions observed in Hall conductance measurements," they added.

The key to their explanation of the recent experimental observations pertaining to the appearance of solid characteristics for magnetic fields in the neighborhood of the 1/3 filling fraction is their finding that "away from the exact fractional fillings, for example near ?=1/3, weak pinning perturbations, due to weak disorder, may overcome the energy gaps between adjacent good angular momentum symmetry-conserving states. The coupling between these states generates broken-symmetry ground states whose densities exhibit spatial crystalline patterns. At the same time, however, the energy gap between the ground state at ?=1/3 and adjacent states is found to be sufficiently large to prevent disorder-induced mixing, thus preserving its quantum fluid nature."

Furthermore, the work shows that the emergence of the crystalline features, via the pinning perturbations, is a consequence of the aforementioned presence of crystalline correlations in the symmetry-conserving states. Consequently, mixing rules that govern the nature of the disorder-pinned crystalline states have been formulated and tested. Extrapolation of the calculated results to the thermodynamic limit shows development of a hexagonal Wigner crystal with enhanced stability due to quantum correlations.

"In closing, the nature of electrons in the fractional quantum Hall regime continues now for close to three decades to be a subject of great fascination, a research field that raises questions whose investigations can lead to deeper conceptual understanding of matter and many-body phenomena, and a rich source of surprise and discovery," said Landman.

This work was supported by the Office of Basic Energy Sciences of the US Department of Energy.

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Journal Reference:

Constantine Yannouleas, Uzi Landman. Unified microscopic approach to the interplay of pinned-Wigner-solid and liquid behavior of the lowest Landau-level states in the neighborhood of ?=1/3. Physical Review B, 2011; 84 (16) DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevB.84.165327

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NASA studying ways to make 'tractor beams' a reality

ScienceDaily (Nov. 3, 2011) — Tractor beams -- the ability to trap and move objects using laser light -- are the stuff of science fiction, but a team of NASA scientists has won funding to study the concept for remotely capturing planetary or atmospheric particles and delivering them to a robotic rover or orbiting spacecraft for analysis.

The NASA Office of the Chief Technologist (OCT) has awarded Principal Investigator Paul Stysley and team members Demetrios Poulios and Barry Coyle at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., $100,000 to study three experimental methods for corralling particles and transporting them via laser light to an instrument -- akin to a vacuum using suction to collect and transport dirt to a canister or bag. Once delivered, an instrument would then characterize their composition.

"Though a mainstay in science fiction, and Star Trek in particular, laser-based trapping isn't fanciful or beyond current technological know-how," Stysley said. The team has identified three different approaches for transporting particles, as well as single molecules, viruses, ribonucleic acid, and fully functioning cells, using the power of light.

"The original thought was that we could use tractor beams for cleaning up orbital debris," Stysley said. "But to pull something that huge would be almost impossible -- at least now. That's when it bubbled up that perhaps we could use the same approach for sample collection."

With the Phase-1 funding from OCT's recently reestablished NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program designed to spur the development of "revolutionary" space technologies, the team will study the state of the technology to determine which of the three techniques would apply best to sample collection. OCT received hundreds of proposals, ultimately selecting only 30 for initial funding.

Replace Current Sample-Collection Methods

Currently, NASA uses a variety of techniques to collect extraterrestrial samples. With Stardust, a space probe launched in 1999, the Agency used aerogel to gather samples as it flew through the coma of comet Wild 2. A capsule returned the samples in 2006. NASA's next rover to Mars, Curiosity, will drill and scoop samples from the Martian surface and then carry out detailed analyses of the materials with one of the rover's many onboard instruments, including the Goddard-built Sample Analysis at Mars instrument suite.

"These techniques have proven to be largely successful, but they are limited by high costs and limited range and sample rate," Stysley said. "An optical-trapping system, on the other hand, could grab desired molecules from the upper atmosphere on an orbiting spacecraft or trap them from the ground or lower atmosphere from a lander. In other words, they could continuously and remotely capture particles over a longer period of time, which would enhance science goals and reduce mission risk."

Team to Study Three Approaches

One experimental approach the team plans to study -- the optical vortex or "optical tweezers" method -- involves the use of two counter-propagating beams of light. The resulting ring-like geometry confines particles to the dark core of the overlapping beams. By alternately strengthening or weakening the intensity of one of the light beams -- in effect heating the air around the trapped particle -- researchers have shown in laboratory testing that they can move the particle along the ring's center. This technique, however, requires the presence of an atmosphere.

Another technique employs optical solenoid beams -- those whose intensity peaks spiral around the axis of propagation. Testing has shown that the approach can trap and exert a force that drives particles in the opposite direction of the light-beam source. In other words, the particulate matter is pulled back along the entire beam of light. Unlike the optical vortex method, this technique relies solely on electromagnetic effects and could operate in a space vacuum, making it ideal for studying the composition of materials on one of the airless planetary moons, for example.

The third technique exists only on paper and has never been demonstrated in the laboratory, Poulios said. It involves the use of a Bessel beam. Normal laser beams when shined against a wall appear as a small point. With Bessel beams, however, rings of light surround the central dot. In other words, when seen straight on, the Bessel beam looks like the ripples surrounding a pebble dropped in a pond. According to theory, the laser beam could induce electric and magnetic fields in the path of an object. The spray of light scattered forward by these fields could pull the object backward, against the movement of the beam itself.

"We want to make sure we thoroughly understand these methods. We have hope that one of these will work for our purposes," Coyle said. "Once we select a technique, we will be in position to then formulate a possible system" and compete for additional NIAC funding to advance the technology to the next level of development. "We're at the starting gate on this," Coyle added. "This is a new application that no one has claimed yet."

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Solar power could get boost from new light absorption design

ScienceDaily (Nov. 2, 2011) — Solar power may be on the rise, but solar cells are only as efficient as the amount of sunlight they collect. Under the direction of a new McCormick professor, researchers have developed a new material that absorbs a wide range of wavelengths and could lead to more efficient and less expensive solar technology.

A paper describing the findings, "Broadband polarization-independent resonant light absorption using ultrathin plasmonic super absorbers," was published November 1 in the journal Nature Communications.

"The solar spectrum is not like a laser -- it's very broadband, starting with UV and going up to near-infrared," said Koray Aydin, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science and the paper's lead author. "To capture this light most efficiently, a solar cell needs to have a broadband response. This design allows us to achieve that."

The researchers used two unconventional materials -- metal and silicon oxide -- to create thin but complex, trapezoid-shaped metal gratings on the nanoscale that can trap a wider range of visible light. The use of these materials is unusual because on their own, they do not absorb light; however, they worked together on the nanoscale to achieve very high absorption rates, Aydin said.

The uniquely shaped grating captured a wide range of wavelengths due to the local optical resonances, causing light to spend more time inside the material until it gets absorbed. This composite metamaterial was also able to collect light from many different angles -- a useful quality when dealing with sunlight, which hits solar cells at different angles as sun moves from east to west throughout the day.

This research is not directly applicable to solar cell technology because metal and silicon oxide cannot convert light to electricity; in fact, the photons are converted to heat and might allow novel ways to control the heat flow at the nanoscale. However, the innovative trapezoid shape could be replicated in semiconducting materials that could be used in solar cells, Aydin said.

If applied to semiconducting materials, the technology could lead to thinner, lower-cost, and more efficient solar cells, he said.

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Koray Aydin, Vivian E. Ferry, Ryan M. Briggs, Harry A. Atwater. Broadband polarization-independent resonant light absorption using ultrathin plasmonic super absorbers. Nature Communications, 2011; 2: 517 DOI: 10.1038/ncomms1528

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What Are You Doing Today, iForge?

What Are You Doing Today, iForge? | Popular Science@import "/files/css/a1c433465f8fe485195cb11d70c36108.css";@import "/files/css/33f6b7ecb4513ed2fe6c670880a27187.css"; home Login/Register Newsletter Subscribe RSS GadgetsComputersCamerasSmartphonesVideo GamesCarsConceptsHybridsElectric CarsScienceFuture of the EnvironmentEnergyHealthPopSci Eco TourTechnologyMilitaryAviationSpaceRobotsEngineeringDIYProjectsHacksToolsAuto DIYMore From Our Partner: Toolmonger GalleriesVideosColumnsThe GrouseSex FilesGreen Dream Innovation ChallengesHow It WorksFeatures Tweet Digg What Are You Doing Today, iForge? Private industry needs to supercompute too. Today, Rolls Royce takes NCSA's iForge out for a spin By Clay Dillow Posted 11.02.2011 at 5:20 pm 4 Comments
NCSA's Forge and iForge Clusters The two systems, which share space at NCSA, are used for academic and commercial purposes respectively. NCSA

Over the last week, we managed to get some of the nation's biggest and baddest supercomputers to take a moment away from their gigabusy schedules and tell us what they were working on. They were happy to share.

Now: a word with iForge, the pride of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

Name: iForge

TOP500 Rank: Not Available

Vital Stats: System: a mix of 121 Dell servers, including 116 PowerEdge M610 servers featuring dual-socket/six-core (12 cores total) 3.46 GHz Intel Xeon x5690 processors, 96GB of DDR3 memory, and 292GB of storage; Three PowerEdge M910 servers featuring quad-socket/eight-core (32 cores total) 1.86 GHz Intel Xeon L7555 processors, 192GB of DDR3 memory, and 292GB of storage; and PowerEdge C6145 servers, which actually combine two complete servers in a single chassis. Each of these four nodes features quad-socket/12-core (48 cores total) 2.5 GHz AMD Opteron 6180SE processors, 256GB of DDR3 memory, and 600 GB of storage.

In English, that’s a 22-teraflop high-performance computing cluster that University of Illinois’ National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) farms out private sector partners, like Rolls Royce, Boeing, and Caterpillar.

What’s Happening: Supercomputers aren’t all about supernova simulations and super-hot plasma interactions, iForge will have you know. Roughly half of the supercomputers in the TOP500 work with private industry helping to make cars safer, materials more durable, or things like the Boeing 787 Dreamliner inexplicably stay aloft. Today iForge is in the employ of Rolls Royce, which you probably know as an automobile maker but should also recognize as a maker of all kinds of power systems, including jet aircraft engines.

Related ArticlesJaguar, What Are You Working on Today?What Are You Working on Today, Ranger Supercomputer?What Are You Working on Today, Roadrunner?TagsTechnology, Data Age, Clay Dillow, aviation, big data, big data supercomputing, iforge, jet engines, ncsa, rolls royceRolls Royce is running more than 50 supercomputing jobs, most of them lasting several hours and some rolling over into the next day. Most modeled complex fluid flow though aircraft engine designs, simulations that will help Rolls Royce design more powerful and more efficient engines. That in turn will make aircraft more reliable and less wasteful. That’s good for everybody. And it’s particularly great for Rolls Royce, which now doesn’t have to prototype every engine concept to see how it will stand up to real world conditions.

iForge also notes that the NCSA is part of XSEDE, the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment, a collection of integrated supercomputing resources that helps find the right computers for the right jobs so that all of the computers in the network are working toward optimum output at all times. Other members of this network of supercomputing resources include Oak Ridge National Labs and the Texas Advanced Computing Center, from whom we’ve already heard this week. But don’t try to think about how powerful such a network of interconnected supercomputers really is, iForge warns. Unless you are actually a supercomputer, it will blow your mind.

Catch up with more supercomputers here.

Previous Article: Advanced Supercomputer Models Supplant Real-World Nuclear Weapons TestsNext Article: The Rise of the Machines 4 Comments Link to this comment Troy Baer 11/02/11 at 10:24 pm

Small correction: Jaguar is not part of XSEDE. Jaguar is one of the DoE's two leadership computing platforms, and XSEDE is an NSF project.

However, Kraken (another large Cray system located at ORNL but operated by the University of Tennessee, #11 on the last Top 500 list) *is* part of XSEDE; in fact, it is currently the most powerful system in the XSEDE project.

(Disclaimer: I'm one of the system administrators for Kraken.)

Link to this comment D13 11/02/11 at 10:56 pm

@Troy : so...whats the price for a day of crunch time on one of these bad boys? ballpark.

"Do not try and bend the spoon. That's impossible. Instead... only try to realize the truth. There is no spoon."

Link to this comment D13 11/02/11 at 11:00 pm

Im not in the market, or anything, im just curious how much coin people drop to use something like this for a 24 hour job. per hr/day. How much to rent SC time?

"Do not try and bend the spoon. That's impossible. Instead... only try to realize the truth. There is no spoon."

Link to this comment scientific anomaly 11/03/11 at 8:17 am

Well it SHOULD be all about supernova simulations and super-hot plasma interactions

-Knock knock
-Who's there?
-The Doctor.
-Doctor Who?
-Yes

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November 2011: Data Is Power

This month, we examine all the ways information is driving our future, from dating to crime to how we see the world.

Plus: turning your smartphone into a wallet, BMW's electric cars, and a space heater with no fan.

Read the issue here.

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