IBM building 'blood'-powered super computer

With companies looking to the human brain to build smarter and more power-efficient computers, one is taking a step further by building a supercomputer powered and cooled by the electronic equivalent of blood, a tech site said.

 

IBM is aiming to build such a supercomputer that can fit into a backpack, though it is not likely to come in the next 10 to 15 years, CNET reported.

 

"A one-petaflop computer in 10 liters - that's our goal," said IBM Research advanced thermal packaging researcher Bruno Michel, according to a report by CNET's Stephen Shankland.

 

Just like our brain

"We are going to provide cooling and power with a fluid. That's how our brain does it," he added.

 

Computers that can perform at one petaflop means they can do a quadrillion floating-point mathematical operations per second.

 

Presently, CNET said the fastest supercomputer can do 33.86 petaflops but needs up to 32,000 Xeon processors and 48,000 Xeon Phi accelerator processors.

 

IBM is also looking to the human brain to make the supercomputer vastly more power-efficient.

 

Matthias Kaiserswerth, director of IBM Research in Zurich, said IBM's Watson supercomputer used 85 kilowatts but the human brain uses just 20 watts.

 

'Operations per liter'

 

CNET said IBM is also using a new measurement to gauge computers' efficiency: operations per liter, or how much data processing can fit into a given volume or size.

 

"In a computer, processors occupy one-millionth of the volume. In a brain, it's 40 percent. Our brain is a volumetric, dense, object," Michel said.

 

3D chips, flow battery

 

IBM is stacking chips into 3D configurations, using a technology dubbed through-silicon vias (TSVs) with liquid cooling channels that deliver fluid that acts as a cooling and power agent.

 

The chips will also have cooling conduits built directly in.

 

CNET said IBM developed Aquasar, a prototype that can perform 7.9 trillion operations per second per gram of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere.

 

Also, IBM is working on a redox flow battery that uses vanadium-based electrolytes to distribute power. Presently, the battery can supply one watt for every square centimeter of a computer's circuit board.

 

The liquid passes not next to the chip, but through it, thus taking away heat "in the thousandth of a second it takes to make the trip," CNET said.

 

IBM researcher Patrick Ruch said the tubes that deliver the electrolytes can measure as little as 100 microns wide, about the width of a human hair.

 

Kaiserswerth said this is part of the cognitive systems era, where computers are not merely programmed but can also perceive what is going on around them.

 

In the cognitive systems era, computers can also make judgments and communicate with natural language—and learn from experience.

 

"If we want to make an impact in the cognitive systems era, we need to understand how the brain works," Kaiserswerth said.

 

Human brain simulation

 

CNET said the Blue Brain and Human Brain Project will come out with a Blue Gene/Q augmented by 128 terabytes of flash memory at the Swiss National Supercomputing Center in Lugano, Switzerland.

 

It will be used to simulate the formation and inner workings of an entire mouse brain, which has about 70 million neurons, it added.

 

Alessandro Curioni, manager of IBM Research's computational sciences department, said the eventual attempt to simulate a human brain will occur at the Juelich Supercomputing Center in northern Germany.

 

Curioni said this will be an "exascale" machine performing one quintillion floating-point operations per second.

 

"It's impossible to experimentally map the brain. If you can't experimentally map the brain, you have to predict it - the numbers of neurons, the types, where the proteins are located, how they'll interact," said co-director Henry Markram of Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, who worked on the Blue Brain project for years and sees computing as the way to understand the true workings of the human brain.

 

"We have to develop an entirely new science where we predict most of the stuff that cannot be measured," he added.

 

If successful, the effort can lead to better cooperation among brain researchers and medical experts, and then to developing potential cures for neural problems.

 

Neuromorphic computing

 

Improved understanding of the brain will in turn will lead to "neuromorphic computing," Curioni said.

 

"Any new rules, circuits, or understanding of how the brain works will allow us to design neuromorphic machines that are much more powerful in terms of cognitive power, energy efficiency, and packaging," Curioni said.

 

Qualcomm

 

Earlier, the Massachussetts Institute of Technology's Technology Review reported Qualcomm is working on a new generation of chips that imitates how the brain processes data.
 

Such hardware uses "physical structures derived from real neurons—parallel and distributed,” even as Qualcomm may get partners to design and manufacture such chips as early as 2014. — TJD, GMA News