Want to Use Quantum Computer? IBM launches One for Free

In Brief
What would you do if you get access to a Quantum Computer? IBM Scientists launches the world’s first cloud-based quantum computing technology, calling the IBM Quantum Experience, for anyone to use. It is an online simulator that lets anyone run algorithms and experiments on the company's five-qubit quantum computer.

Quantum computers are expected to take the computing technology to

IBM Discloses Working Version of a Much Higher-Capacity Chip

IBM has taken the technology industry with surprise through its announcement of successfully developing working versions of ultradense computer chips. These chips are said to possess four times the capacity of today’s most powerful chips.

This announcement was essentially made on behalf of an international consortium led by IBM. IBM has invested $3 billion in an exclusive private public partnership in New York’s Hudson Valley with New York State, Samsung, GlobalFoundries and equipment vendors to manufacture advanced computer chips.

New Generation Of Chip In Development

It should be noted that each generation of chip is defined by the minimum size of fundamental components, which play role in switch current at nanosecond intervals. In modern times technology industry is actively working towards making a commercial transition from 14 nanometer to 10 nanometer manufacturing. Each generation helps in achieving 50 per cent reduction in the amount of area required for circuitry. IBM has affirmed its new chip which is still in research phase will be based on the shirking the area of semiconductor as much as possible by 2018.

IBM currently has working samples of chips with just seven nanometer transistors. It has been able to develop such sizes due to use of advanced silicon-gremanium instead of relying on pure silicon in key regions of chip. This material has made it possible to develop faster transistor switching with low power requirements, which is an added advantage. Given the smaller size of the transistors, it is highly possible to build microprocessors with not more than 20 billion transistors.

IBM Brings Focus Back On Itself As Revolutionary Chip Manufacturer

IBM has already shed a certain amount of its computer and semiconductor manufacturing capacity in the recent past. But this announcement shows that IBM is still interested in backing the technology manufacturing base with its efficient research facilities. Rather than being the horse power in building and providing chips to the companies it will act as a pioneer in unearthing advanced technological solutions for others. IBM will have to grapple with shift to use extreme ultraviolet (EUV) light for etching patterns on the chips at a resolution which approaches the diameter of an individual atom.

IBM will be licensing the technology to a variety of manufactures and most importantly, GlobalFoundries which is owned by the Emirate of Abu Dhabi will be making these chips for some big companies which includes, Qualcomm, Broadcom and others. It is yet to been whether semiconductor industry thinks on using silicon-gremanium as the best option or not.

IBM Refuses To Confirm Commercial Manufacturing

IBM has simply declined whether it will begin commercial manufacturing of this technology or not. Another ambitious company named Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company had given green lights to its plans to begin production of seven nanometer chips in 2017.

Given the precision required for using EUV light to keep the high capacity usage of chips optimum might be a concern in the commercial manufacturing operations. The goal of IBM here is to create next generation circuits, which offer higher capacity with reduced area, and most probably with current advancements and right amount of further research this technology will be introduced next year.

IBM Identity Mixer Wants To Better Protect Your Personal Data from Hackers

IBM had finally developed a cloud-based cryptogram called Identity Mixer which will address the prevalent data breaches and theft in its own way. Identity Mixer would provide a safe haven for the users and it would keep them safe from any unwanted event of loss of personal data in any manner. This service is also going to make sure that suspicious and unwanted individuals don’t have access to the sensitive personal information.

In the years there had been several instances of loss of personal data such as in Home Depot, JPMorgan Chase and icloud hacking activities. Personal data today comprises of vast number of info which ranges from email address, phone numbers o credit card details. IBM Identity Mixer will help them securing those data in encrypted form.

Identity Mixer Could Help In Securing Personal Data To Great Extent

Identity Mixer provides solutions to the users in terms of giving out their personal data to different institutions in effective manner. It effectively uses the cryptographic algorithm which confirms automatically the user’s identity i.e. ‘who they are’ to the institution they wish to confirm without actually giving up personal information by themselves.

To across this dynamic solution straight forward lets consider that a person wishes to subscribe to a Netflix account. Netflix have it own terms and conditions such as users should be 18 years of age as well as live in a certain region in order to create an account. Identity Mixer comes in rescue for the users by providing an encrypted ID card which stores the personal information to such institutions without user’s requirement to do it manually.

Benefits Of Utilizing Identity Mixer

Identity Mixer will eliminate the need for the IT organisations to collect the personal information like age, nationality, address and most importantly the credit card numbers. Instead of manually declaring the data users will have a set of encrypted credentials in place which could be verified by Identity Mixer. This approach would also eliminate the use of sharing personal information by the users and at the same time it makes the process of identifying the user identities for any service provider on Web sphere. Identity Mixer is already working with AU2EU.

The Identity Mixer’s cryptogram could work with any other service which requires any kind of identification like the digital wallets which are gaining popularity these days. Having the Identity Mixer in place will make sure that user’s don’t have to input their credit card details into the digital wallets at all. In this respect this service also identical to the security system place in Apple Pay.

IBM To Enhance Its Identity Mixer

Currently IBM is running the public beta version of Identity Mixer on its state of art Bluemix cloud platform. But IBM has plans to make its Identity Mixer available to any provider of web service either through its own Bluemix or in the form of software deployed on their systems. IBM is even allowing the independent developers to try their hand on its Identity Mixer to make it better with new feature and highly secure in every aspect.

IBM’s Replacement for NAND

New Project Theseus of IBM has some promising and capable ways of replacing the NAND in the long term with a widely higher performance together with better write endurance which would make this technology an excellent choice in storage if someone agrees in the manufacture of the same. IBM had portrayed a new way of memory technology which the company considers to be a replacement for NAND flash someday, and the company’s Theseus Project which is conducted in coordination with the University of Patras in Greece seems to be the first attempt in combining phase change memory, conventional NAND and DRAM on a single controller. The outcome is a hybridized storage solution which outperforms PCIe based SSDs between 12 and 275 times.

Physics of Phase Change Memory

The physics of phase change : The phase change memory is one of those alternative memory structure which has been proposed as a kind of replacement for NAND and the phase change memory operates by rapidly heating chalcogenide glass, moving it between it crystalline and amorphous state. While in its amorphous state which is read as binary 0, the structure has a very high resistance and in its crystalline state which is known as binary 1, the resistance is comparatively low. Phase change memory has the capabilities of quickly shifting between the two state and research done from Intel and Micron have also demonstrated the feasibility of intermediate states that enables two bits of information which can be stored in each cell.

Hybrid Structure for Effective Leverage

Moreover phase change memory has a much lower latency than NAND with a much faster read, write times in theory, and can tolerate millions of write cycles when compared to30,000 high end SLC NAND as well as few as 1,000 with TLC NAND. Besides, it is also well positioned compared to various other theoretical memory devices and NAND flash has huge economies of scale with billions invested in fab plants all across the globe. IBM along with Theseus has incorporated a small amount of PCM into a hybrid structure for effective leverage with its ultra-low latency characteristics.

3D NAND Better Choice

These early PCMs were built on a 90 nm CMOS at very low density where modern NAND flash is available presently in 512Gbit size when compared to 128Mbit for PCM. It is a compact order of magnitude which is faster than a commercial NAND accompanied with superior write performance with data longevity. Though there lies a problem where IBM makes a point that its PSS solution utilises 90nm memory which is produced by Micron, who earlier this year gave notice that it would be cancelling all of its PCM production and would be pulling out of the industry, while leaving the door open to revisit the memory tech sometime in the near future, they also indicated that the superior scaling of a 3D NAND would be a better choice inspite of the various problem faced with the technology in short term.

PCM – Promising Next Generation Memory Technology

According to 2013 ITRS report, it was noted that NAND performance was not expected to increase much from its present situation but in fact would be a bit difficult in maintaining current NAND performance while making improvement in density and holding write endurance constant. Presently PCM seems to be a promising next generation memory technology and someone needs to step in the manufacture of it or else it would be a difficult sell.

Nvidia unveils Pascal, its next-gen GPU

Pascal a super computer module was unveiled by Jen Hsun Huang, CEO of Nvidia, at the annual conference of the company. This new architecture optimizes data transfer between the CPU and the GPU and uses a new type of memory arranged in three dimensions. According to NVidia, the module presented, which is one third the size of a PCIe graphics card brings the power of a supercomputer in the area occupied by two credit cards.

 NVidia, the manufacturer of graphics processors for computers and systems on a chip (SoC) that is found in tablets and Smartphones, held its annual conference this week (CWG 2014) in San Jose, California. This is an opportunity to unveil new graphics processor architecture for the next generation of chips, video games, mobile SoC devices and supercomputers. Pascal called in honor of the French scientist Blaise Pascal, this super computer is an important technical milestone with the introduction of several technologies that optimize the use of RAM and reduce bottlenecks for data transfer between the GPU and the central processor CPU.

The first of these is the new 3D memory, which consists of stacked DRAM cells arranged vertically and integrate all on the same semiconductor as the CPU. NVidia announces that the memory should be multiplied by 2.5 with a much larger bandwidth. This 3D architecture also allows you to place voltage regulators near the chip, which has the effect of optimizing the energy efficiency that would be four times higher than a GDDR5 memory solution. NVidia emphasizes that through this, the Pascal module will have one third of the size of a PCIe graphics card.

For its new processor architecture, NVIDIA opted for a RAM in 3D. The memory access is much faster while allowing a more compact design. Another key innovation is a new interconnected technology between the CPU and GPU named NVLink. It was co-developed with IBM with the goal to leverage the speed of data transfer between the two processors. According to NVidia , NVLink is 5-12 times faster than that can offer PCI Express bus third generation, because it leaves the GPU memory access the CPU at full bandwidth and vice versa.

The founder announced a bandwidth of 80 to 200 Gb / s, against 16 GB / s of PCIe 3.0. NVLink also renews the interconnection between the GPUs themselves, which will make creating clustering configurations that may include multiple GPUs. This new type of interconnects will greatly benefit applications that take advantage of hardware acceleration and massively for parallel computing. Through this system of unified memory, NVidia promises developers they will be released for optimizing problematic communication protocols.

IBM plans to integrate this technology into future versions of Power processors. Note that NVidia does not intend to abandon the PCIe bus. All transactions and configuration control initiated by the CPU go through a PCIe connection only. If a CPU is not NVLink supported, may interconnect between the GPU and function to improve the performance rise, or scaling. In other words, NVLink will somehow technical manufacturers of processors may or may not choose to adopt. The first chips from the architecture Pascal arrive in 2016.