Tuesday, June 23. 2009Computer Clusters That Heat HousesA novel water-cooling system makes it more efficient for computers to heat buildings.
By Duncan Graham-Rowe
Thanks to a novel on-chip water-cooling system developed by the company, the thermal energy from a cluster of computer processors can be efficiently recycled to provide hot water for an office, says Bruno Michel, manager of advanced thermal packaging at IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory, in Switzerland. The goal, he says, is to improve the energy efficiency of large computing clusters and reduce their environmental impact. A pilot scheme involving a computer system fitted with the technology is expected to save up to 30 tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year--the equivalent of an 85 percent carbon footprint reduction. A novel network of microfluidic capillaries inside a heat sink is attached to the surface of each chip in the computer cluster, which allows water to be piped to within microns of the semiconductor material itself. Despite its close proximity to the circuitry, there is no danger of leakage, says Michel, because the capillaries are hermetically sealed. By having water flow so close to each chip, heat can be removed more efficiently. Water heated to 60 °C is then passed through a heat exchanger to provide heat that is delivered elsewhere. IBM has spent several years developing the microfluidic cooling technology, and it plans to test it in partnership with Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, in Zurich. A 10-teraflop computer cluster consisting of two IBM BladeCenter Servers in a single rack will be used by the university's Computational Science and Engineering Lab to model fluid dynamics for nanotechnology research. The water will then be plumbed into the university's heating system, where it will help heat 60 buildings. "This is the first large-scale system," says Michel. "It's about one-twentieth of the size of an average data center." Ultimately, he says, the technology could help address the energy problems posed by large data centers. Up to 50 percent of the energy consumed by a modern data center goes toward air cooling. Most of the heat is then wasted because it is just dumped into the atmosphere. There have been a few efforts to recycle the heat generated by conventional data centers. For example, a nine-story, 18,500-square-meter data center being built in London by the hosting company Telehouse Europe will provide heating for nearby offices. Other companies, including IBM, have used excess thermal energy to heat green houses or swimming pools. But reusing waste heat is expensive because usually only relatively low temperatures can be harvested, says Frank Brand, director of operations of the Dutch data-center engineering firm Imtech. "You can only get about 30 to 35 degrees Celsius," he says. In contrast, because water is many times more efficient at capturing heat than air, water cooling can deliver much higher temperatures, says Michel. Water was once commonly used to cool mainframe computers, but this merely consisted of piping cold water through server cabinets to cool the air near the racks. By some estimates, information technology infrastructure is responsible for as much as 2 percent of global carbon emissions, putting it on a par with aviation. And some experts say that this figure is set to double in the next five years. "It's more efficient to heat water and move it somewhere else than it is with air," says Jonathan Koomey, a project scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories and a consulting professor at Stanford University. In 2005, data centers were responsible for 1 percent of global electricity--a doubling of 2000 levels, Koomey says. But he's not convinced that the figure will continue to grow. "There are many ways to improve the efficiency of data centers," he says. For example, better management of computer centers can improve efficiencies dramatically. "We have servers that on average are running at 5 to 15 percent of their maximum load," Koomey says. "Even if the server is doing nothing, it's still using 60 to 70 percent of its power." Brand also notes that "air is a much cheaper way to do the cooling" and that modern data centers consume far less energy than do their older counterparts for cooling. The trend toward stacking processors on top of each other to increase their power density is another reason why IBM is pursuing this sort of microfluidic water cooling, says Michel. Such three-dimensional chips will pose serious problems for traditional air-based cooling systems, he says. Copyright Technology Review 2009. ----- Personal comment: Voilà quelquechose qu'on attendait depuis longtemps et qui permettrait de développer un cycle énergétique-information au sein d'une architecture (ou d'un groupe architectural et une ferme informatique, etc.) Traveling the Web TogetherA browser plug-in aims to make it far simpler to browse the Web with friends.
By Erica Naone
Researchers from the College of William and Mary, in Williamsburg, VA, hope to change that with software called RCB (for real-time collaborative browsing) that makes it far simpler to connect with another person as he or she clicks around the Web. There are already a few ways to navigate through Web pages collaboratively, but each has its limitations. Trailfire, for example, lets a user record her Web sessions but doesn't allow users to browse together at the same time. Another service, called Weblin, provides a way to annotate sites with animations and avatars, but it is only geared toward interacting on a single Web page. More powerful "screen sharing" lets users browse together as if sharing the same machine, but this normally involves connecting to an outside server. What sets RCB apart, says Haining Wang, an assistant professor of computer science at William and Mary, is its simplicity. Only the person leading a session needs to have a browser extension installed--others can then participate with any standard Web browser. "This makes cobrowsing very simple and practical," Wang says. The researchers suggest that RCB could be particularly useful for businesses offering customer support, for distance-learning courses, or for friends who want to share links. To use RCB, one person has to install a Firefox browser extension. This allows her to generate a session URL that can be sent to other participants. When a second user clicks on the URL, the host's RCB extension sends him to a Web page that then connects him to the first person's browser. Once connected, both users can interact with a Web page and follow links, with all actions funneled through the host's browser. The host also retains control over the session and can add or remove participants as needed. A host can connect to up to 10 participants without losing too much performance, but the researchers say that RCB is best suited for two people at a time. "There is a real desire by users to share URLs with collaborators in real time," says Meredith Ringel Morris, a computer scientist in the adaptive systems and interaction group at Microsoft Research, who launched a collaborative search tool called SearchTogether last year. A survey conducted by Morris in 2006 found that 30 percent of participants said that they had tried to browse with others using instant messaging. Morris says that the researchers' efforts to simplify cobrowsing through RCB "are a big step in the right direction." Users with limited technical skills could especially benefit from a cobrowsing tool, Morris says, since it allows a more experienced Internet user to walk them through unfamiliar tasks. Because this needs to be easy to do, she says, it's important that RCB uses a regular Web browser. On the other hand, Morris worries that RCB places too much of a burden on the host of a cobrowsing session. As the system is currently implemented, a user can only set up a session if she knows her computer's host name or Internet protocol (IP) address, as well as the number of an unused transmission control protocol (TCP) port. Vladimir Estivill-Castro, a professor at the School of Information and Communication Technology at Griffith University, in Australia, who has studied the usability of cobrowsing tools, says that the approach "seems rather convenient." But he thinks that more work needs to be done to improve the system so that many users can take actions on a single Web page. RCB is not yet available to the public, but the researchers presented their work last week at the Usenix Technical Conference, in San Diego. Wang says that his group filed a provisional patent last September with the hope of getting the technology adopted by major browser vendors. Copyright Technology Review 2009. ----- Personal comment: Ca ne vous fait penser à rien? Knowscape? (qui allait d'ailleurs plus loin en terme de concepts) Monday, June 22. 2009The Tree MuseumNote: This is a guest post by Nicola Twilley.
At the northern end of the Concourse, at 206th St, there's a huge chunk of rock between two buildings; it's like the side of a cliff. I had to give the tree there, No. 95, to Sid Horenstein, a geologist who recently retired from the American Museum of Natural History. He's able to use the rock outcrop to explain the story of what the Concourse lies above—it was built on a ridge and that's one of the main reasons the street was constructed here, because it was elevated and offered spectacular views of the countryside all around. And Tree No. 45, a Little Leaf Linden, has a story told by Patricia Foody, a 95-year-old Bronxite. She remembers her dad bringing her for a walk to the Concourse to visit his brother's tree in just this location—it was one of the original maples, and many of them had plaques for soldiers who had died in World War I. Some of the stories come from people who work with the trees directly: Jennifer Greenfeld, director of Street Tree Planting for the Parks and Recreation department, uses No. 66, a Chinese Elm, to provide an overview of street trees throughout New York City and the policy battles they sometimes cause. Barbara Barnes, a landscape architect also with the Parks department, puts her tree in the context of the historic street tree canopy project she's working on, to replant Joyce Kilmer and Franz Sigel parks as they were originally laid out.
Perhaps more importantly, Holten's Tree Museum (which she describes as "practically invisible—it's part of the urban fabric") demonstrates an intriguing way to re-imagine the landscape: finding ways to make the hidden layers and connections of a street's story visible (or audible) might ultimately be as, if not more, important than installing a new swing set in the park. ----- Via BLDBLOG Personal comment:
Les arbres comme "disque dur" et "capteurs" d'information climatiques. Un des partcipants pour le concours "Climate Clock - San Jose" s'était servi d'arbres en tant que "capteurs durables" (l'installation devant servir une centaine d'années). S'était une approche intéressante. Ici, le mélnage de télécommunications (appeler les arbres), de développement durable, de monitoring et de narration (une histoire par arbre) est également une approche suprenante et intéressante. Cell Phones That Listen and LearnNew software tracks a user's behavior by monitoring everyday sounds.
By Kristina Grifantini
Now a group at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, NH, has created software that uses the microphone on a cell phone to track and interpret a user's situation. The software, called SoundSense, picks up sounds and tries to classify them into certain categories. In contrast to similar software developed previously, SoundSense can be trained by the user to recognize completely unfamiliar sounds, and it also runs entirely on the device. SoundSense automatically classifies sounds as "voice," "music," or "ambient noise." If a sound is repeated often enough or for long enough, SoundSense gives it a high "sound rank" and asks the user to confirm that it is significant and offers the option to label the sound. The Dartmouth team focused on monitoring sound because every phone has a microphone and because GPS doesn't work well indoors, while accelerometers provide only limited information. "When we think about sounds, we don't typically think that they can also represent a location that has a unique signature," says Andrew Campbell, an associate professor of computer science at Dartmouth and a lead researcher on the project. The researchers made sure the program is small, so that it doesn't use too much power. To address privacy concerns, they designed SoundSense so that information is not removed from the device for processing. Additionally, the program itself doesn't store raw audio clips. A user can also tell the software to ignore any sounds deemed off limits. In testing, the SoundSense software was able to correctly determine when the user was in a particular coffee shop, walking outside, brushing her teeth, cycling, and driving in the car. It also picked up the noise of an ATM machine and a fan in a particular room. The results of the experiments will be presented this week at the MobiSys 2009 conference, in Krakow, Poland. "The SoundSense system is our first step in building a system that can learn [user behavior] on the go," says Tanzeem Choudhury, an assistant professor at Dartmouth who was also involved in the project and TR35 winner. Choudhury says that enabling the software to learn to recognize new sounds will be essential for practical applications. "A system that can recognize sounds in a person's life can be used to search for others who have the same preferences," she says. Using sounds to classify events can give users feedback on their daily activities for health or time-management applications, she adds. Kurt Partridge, a researcher at Palo Alto Research Center, who has also created cell-phone software that tracks behavior, believes that the SoundSense project exploits an underused resource. "I don't think the field has really realized both how little power audio-based activity-sensing takes, and how informative it can be," Partridge says. "Audio can distinguish so many more activities [and] adds a social aspect to contextual sensing that's not possible otherwise." Dan Ellis, an associate professor at Columbia University, who has researched the use of continuous audio recordings, says that this type of "life logging" could someday be used as routinely as the outbox in an e-mail application. "Maybe you don't look at your outbox very often, but given the right tools to quickly find what you're looking for, it's very convenient to keep a record of every e-mail you're ever sent," he says. "A near-continuous, audio-based record collected by a personal device could be similarly desirable." Copyright Technology Review 2009. ----- Personal comment: On a déjà posté quelques articles qui touchent au "reality mining" ainsi qu'au monitoring d'informations par les téléphones (notamment pour de meilleurs réveils matin ou pour la santé). Ici aussi un piste de recherche qui poursuit son chemin.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Science & technology
at
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Defined tags for this entry: mobile, mobility, monitoring, research, science & technology, sound, surveillance
Saturday, June 20. 2009Layar est-il le futur de la réalité augmentée ?La firme Hollandaise SPRXmobile devrait sortir sous peu une application pour Android qu’elle désigne comme “le premier navigateur à réalité augmenté”. Appelé Layar, l’application est une plateforme qui rend accessible des contenus et des données en surimpression de la vue offerte par la caméra vidéo du téléphone. Des commerces, banques, sociétés spécialisés dans la recherche de restaurant et services d’immobiliers ont deja créé des couches d’informations disponibles sur la plateforme, qui pour l’instant se limite à la Hollande. La démonstration est tout simplement bluffante. Le blog, NotJustReality cite Raimo van der Klein, cofondateur de SPRXmobile qui affirme : “A terme, le monde physique et virtuel ne feront plus qu’un”. C’est une vision quelque peu dérangeante, mais l’application Layar n’en est pas moins cool pour autant. L’idée terrifiante d’avoir une couche d’information commerciale superposée au monde réel n’est pas à prendre à la légère, mais on peut également envisager une multitude d’autres informations, en provenance d’encyclopédies telles que Wikipedia ou de son réseau social, qui permettront d’appréhender la réalité de façon différente. Nous avions par le passé déjà fait un premier aperçu du marché de la réalité augmentée, cette application est, pour l’instant, et si la démo se confirme bien en réalité, la plus aboutie à ce jour. Le blog Talk Android de Google stipule que l’application sera disponible sous peu dans l’Android Store, mais ne mentionne aucune date de sortie pour d’autre pays que la Hollande. SPRXmobile, de son coté, affirme travailler à la sortie de Layar pour iPhone. Via ReadWriteWeb (Fabrice Epelboin)
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fabric | rblgThis blog is the survey website of fabric | ch - studio for architecture, interaction and research. We curate and reblog articles, researches, writings, exhibitions and projects that we notice and find interesting during our everyday practice and readings. Most articles concern the intertwined fields of architecture, territory, art, interaction design, thinking and science. From time to time, we also publish documentation about our own work and research, immersed among these related resources and inspirations. This website is used by fabric | ch as archive, references and resources. It is shared with all those interested in the same topics as we are, in the hope that they will also find valuable references and content in it.
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