Better by Design
SiCortex (www.sicortex.com), the first company to engineer a Linux cluster from the silicon up, illustrated the opportunity for dramatic power saving by demonstrating the first high performance computer powered solely by a team of bicyclists. The computer, an SC648, conducted a complex genomics analysis at a rate of billions of calculations per second while being powered by a team of 8-10 bicyclists riding generator-equipped bicycles, producing an average of 260 watts each.
Energy usage has become among the most pressing issues in high performance computing, also called supercomputing, with the demand for power growing every year. Because of the types of chips they use, traditional high performance computers run extremely hot, and require a tremendous amount of power to not only run the machines, but to provide industrial strength air conditioning to cool them. Power demands for high performance computers have increased so dramatically, that utilities have capped the amount of electricity they will deliver to some computer centers. SiCortex’s systems are designed to provide extremely fast calculations while radically reducing power consumption.
“For every high-performance computer in use today, society could benefit from a hundred of them,” said Dr. John Mucci, SiCortex CEO. “But unless we retire the current power hogs, we will never get there in a sustainable way. At SiCortex we set out to show that we can build a serious high performance computer while reducing power requirements to levels that were previously thought to be impossible.”
To illustrate the huge benefits of high-performance computing, the bicycle-powered SC648 carried out a very advanced genomics computation from the US Department of Agriculture. The application analyzes and compares the genomes of hundreds of potentially-related insect pests to determine which are the most-closely related and to uncover heretofore undocumented species. New species can require changes to existing international trade agreements and put domestic crops at risk.
“Ten years ago, this analysis was impossible on even the biggest computers, and now it’s being done on a bicycle powered machine,” said Mucci “Ten years from now, we’ll probably be doing it right down at the docks as they unload the ships. But these tools will only proliferate if we learn to design them to be sustainable.”
Telecom History Made
The US has passed a milestone in telecommunications history: the percentage of Americans in cellphone-only households now exceeds the percentage of people living in landline-only households, according to Mediamark Research Inc. This is one of the key findings in “The Birth of a Cellular Nation,” a newly released MRI white paper.
MRI conducts approximately 26,000 in-home, in-person interviews yearly with US adults, collecting data in two “waves” of interviews with 13,000 respondents. In the most current wave fielded from September 2006-April 2007, the cell-only segment was 14%, and the landline-only population dropped to 12.3%. Young consumers, particularly those who live on their own, dominate the burgeoning cell-only population.
“Logic would suggest that single-person households have less need for a landline. And, of course, fewer income-earners to pay for one,” said Andrew Arthur, Vice President of MRI’s Market Solutions division and the author of Birth of a Cell Phone Nation. “The economic and practical realities faced by people living alone tend to force a choice between the two technologies and the numbers are particularly striking at the young end of the spectrum. Of 18-24 year-olds who live in single-person households, 57.1% are now cell-only, making them more than four times as likely to be cell-only as the average adult.”
TV Has Staying Power
European consumers are set to benefit from new digital content formats and interactive applications over the next few years, but only 20% of viewing will be “on demand” by 2012, according to findings from global business consultancy Bain & Company. ‘The Digital Video Consumer, Transforming the European Video Content Market” explains how the market is evolving as iPods, mobile phones and computers are increasingly being used to download video content.
The European video content market, currently worth EUR123 billion is growing at 4-6% per year. Technology evolution, innovation and competition will deliver to the consumer unprecedented power and choice about what they watch, when and how, but for several reasons, traditional television has staying power.
Watching television is very different than surfing the Internet - a “lean back” versus a “lean forward” experience. Though alternative technology will continue to offer the consumer improved video content viewing options over the next five years, it will take time to catch up with the “lean back” experience of traditional television. Youth behavior is changing, with viewing habits shifting toward new Internet video on demand, but the impact will be limited through 2012, with most changes not being felt for 10 to 15 years, as demographic changes take time to flow through and because experience suggests that only some youth behavior carries forward into later life.
Give 1 Get 1 Program
Any nation’s most precious resource is its children. Most of the nearly two billion children in the developing world are inadequately educated, or in some cases, receive no education at all. One in three does not complete the fifth grade. The individual and societal consequences of this chronic global crisis are profound. Children are consigned to poverty and isolation - never knowing what the light of learning could mean in their lives.
One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), is a non-profit organization launched in 2005 by MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte to design, manufacture and distribute laptop computers that are sufficiently affordable to provide every child in the world access to new channels of learning, sharing and self-expression. OLPC has announced a unique opportunity for the general public to put an innovative and powerful educational tool into the hands of children in the developing world.
Called “Give 1 Get 1,” the two-week program will enable any individual in the USA or Canada to support the OLPC Foundation and its work by paying for two XO children’s laptop computers - one to give, one to get. The laptop you give will go to a child in a developing nation. The laptop you get can be used by you or a deserving child or friend. The Give 1 Get 1 program is designed to promote awareness and understanding of the education value of the XO laptop, to encourage the open-source software community to create education content to support use of the XO laptop by children in the developing world, and, of course, to put more XO laptops into the hands of those children. The two-week, limited-time offer will run from Monday, Nov. 12 through Monday, Nov. 26, 2007.
In the meanwhile, effective immediately, the public can go to www.XOgiving.org to give a laptop, without receiving one. A charitable contribution of $200 will provide a child in a developing country with an XO laptop computer of their own. In addition, visitors to the website can sign up to be put on an alert list to receive an e-mail reminder on Nov. 12 that Give 1 Get 1 has started.
The XO laptop was conceived at the Media Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The XO laptop, a general-purpose device, comes with a built-in video camera, sophisticated sound processing and software for making music, creating art, playing games, browsing the web and word processing. The XO can also be used as an e-book reader. The XO has many features not found in any other laptop, including:
*Rugged design and sealed case to make it water- and shock-resistant.
*High-resolution screen that can be read in direct sunlight, as well as indoors in the dark.
*Lower power consumption using only 5-10 percent of the average wattage of a normal laptop.
*Can be powered by solar energy and human energy with pull cords and hand cranks.
*Mesh (peer-to-peer) network that turns each XO into a full-time router connecting each laptop and allowing for easy Internet access.
*No moving parts, except for the antennae for the mesh network and the hinge.
*Runs on free, open source software.
