Computers & the Internet News and Discussions

[weatheriscool]

Dual-plasmid editing system improves DNA digital storage potential
https://phys.org/news/2022-08-dual-plas ... ntial.html
by Chinese Academy of Sciences

DNA-based information is a new interdisciplinary field linking information technology and biotechnology. The field hopes to meet the enormous need for long-term data storage by using DNA as an information storage medium. Despite DNA's promise of strong stability, high storage density and low maintenance cost, however, researchers face problems accurately rewriting digital information encoded in DNA sequences.

Generally, DNA data storage technology has two modes, i.e., the "in vitro hard disk mode" and the "in vivo CD mode." The primary advantage of the in vivo mode is its low-cost, reliable replication of chromosomal DNA by cell replication. Due to this characteristic, it can be used for rapid and low-cost data copy dissemination. Since encoded DNA sequences for some information contain a large number of repeats and the appearance of homopolymers, however, such information can only be "written" and "read," but cannot be accurately "rewritten."

[caltrek]

Minor Google Meltdown Exposes the World's Dependence on a Single Tech Company
by Paul Haskell-Dowland
August 10, 2022

Introduction:

(Science Alert ) Earlier today, reports began emerging Google was down.

While it has since returned, it once again highlights our dependence on technology service providers and shows how reliant many people are on a single operator for daily functions.

There are few things we completely rely upon in our modern lives, but for many people, Google is one.

Its brief disappearance from the internet felt, for many, like an almost-apocalyptic moment – underscoring how deeply 'googling' has been integrated into our lives.

Read more here: https://www.sciencealert.com/today-s-g ... oncerting

[weatheriscool]

Google Fiber Begins First Expansion Since 2015
https://www.extremetech.com/internet/33 ... since-2015
By Ryan Whitwam on August 12, 2022 at 11:15 am

Google Fiber has awakened from its slumber, and that could be good news for all of us. The Alphabet subsidiary has barely expanded its super-fast gigabit internet service since it was spun off from Google in 2015, but CEO Dinni Jain says the company is now focusing on “more build velocity” with expansions in five different states.

Unlike high-speed internet from companies like Comcast, Google Fiber relies on laying new lines to homes. It’s an expensive process that requires working with public utilities and local governments, but Google Fiber has refined its process over the past few years, identifying which techniques work and which do not. For example, it won’t be taping cables to sidewalks to save time.

In the past year, Google Fiber has done more building than in the previous few years combined, and now it’s ready to expand. The service will go live in multiple cities in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Nebraska, and Nevada over the next several years. That includes some previously announced but delayed expansions like Colorado Springs, Colorado, and Mesa, Arizona. The company has identified these areas as underserved by high-speed internet.

Jain has kept a low profile since taking over Google Fiber in 2018, but it’s not like there was much to talk about. After years of losing money on fiber rollouts, parent company Alphabet seemed to want Fiber to stand on its own. Indeed, Jain concedes in an interview with Reuters that Fiber cannot survive by virtue of “a rich parent’s wallet.”

[Nanotechandmorefuture]

Google Fiber Begins First Expansion Since 2015
https://www.extremetech.com/internet/33 ... since-2015
By Ryan Whitwam on August 12, 2022 at 11:15 am

Google Fiber has awakened from its slumber, and that could be good news for all of us. The Alphabet subsidiary has barely expanded its super-fast gigabit internet service since it was spun off from Google in 2015, but CEO Dinni Jain says the company is now focusing on “more build velocity” with expansions in five different states.

Unlike high-speed internet from companies like Comcast, Google Fiber relies on laying new lines to homes. It’s an expensive process that requires working with public utilities and local governments, but Google Fiber has refined its process over the past few years, identifying which techniques work and which do not. For example, it won’t be taping cables to sidewalks to save time.

In the past year, Google Fiber has done more building than in the previous few years combined, and now it’s ready to expand. The service will go live in multiple cities in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Nebraska, and Nevada over the next several years. That includes some previously announced but delayed expansions like Colorado Springs, Colorado, and Mesa, Arizona. The company has identified these areas as underserved by high-speed internet.

Jain has kept a low profile since taking over Google Fiber in 2018, but it’s not like there was much to talk about. After years of losing money on fiber rollouts, parent company Alphabet seemed to want Fiber to stand on its own. Indeed, Jain concedes in an interview with Reuters that Fiber cannot survive by virtue of “a rich parent’s wallet.”

Google's got the blue hairs and all that good stuff as company culture it seems on some level so not a bad thing. Can't wait to switch to the Google phone plans where I am at since they are cheap. Bring on the Fiber!

[weatheriscool]

Using a GAN architecture to restore heavily compressed music files
https://techxplore.com/news/2022-08-gan ... music.html
by Ingrid Fadelli , Tech Xplore

Over the past few decades, computer scientists have developed increasingly advanced technologies and tools to store large amounts of music and audio files in electronic devices. A particular milestone for music storage was the development of MP3 (i.e., MPEG-1 layer 3) technology, a technique to compress sound sequences or songs into very small files that can be easily stored and transferred between devices.

The encoding, editing and compression of media files, including PKZIP, JPEG, GIF, PNG, MP3, AAC, Cinepak and MPEG-2 files, is achieved using a set of technologies known as codecs. Codecs are compression technologies with two key components: an encoder that compresses files and a decoder that decompresses them.

There are two types of codecs, the so-called lossless and lossy codecs. During decompression, lossless codecs, such as PKZIP and PNG codecs, reproduce the exact same file as original files. Lossy compression methods, on the other hand, produce a facsimile of the original file that sounds (or looks) like the original but takes up less storage space in electronic devices.

Lossy audio codecs essentially work by compressing digital audio streams, removing some data, and then decompressing them. Generally, the difference between the original and decompressed file is hard or impossible for humans to perceive.

When lossy codecs use high compression rates, however, they can introduce impairments and perceivably alter audio signals. Recently, computer scientists have been trying to overcome this limitation of lossy codecs and enhance the quality of compressed files using deep learning techniques.

[weatheriscool]

Advanced microscope techniques could pave way for improved computer memories
https://phys.org/news/2022-09-advanced- ... ories.html
by Jared Sagoff, Argonne National Laboratory

Anyone who has watched steam billow up from a boiling kettle or seen ice crystals form on a wet window in winter has observed what scientists call a phase transition.

Phase transitions—such as those between solids, liquids and gases—occur in all kinds of different substances, and they can happen rapidly or slowly. Scientists plan to use phase transitions to be able to control the electronic, structural or magnetic properties of different materials as they undergo these changes, such as for use in new types of computer memories.

In the new study, researchers have for the first time been able to look at a structural phase transition in minute detail on a very fast timescale. The scientists made X-ray "photographs" that are spaced less than one-tenth of 1 billionth of a second apart through a technique called nanodiffraction microscopy. "A typical video might play at 30 frames per second, so this is approximately a slow-motion video that can resolve dynamics that are extremely fast," said Haidan Wen, a physicist at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory.

The ability to witness the evolution of material behavior with such precision in time and space has revealed unusual behaviors in certain materials that undergo a phase change, including many magnetic materials.

[Yuli Ban]

Nvidia looks set to finally give the RTX 4000 series its official unveiling in 11 days. Adding to the hype train is yet another alleged leaked benchmark for what will be the flagship card of the expected three initial releases: the RTX 4090.

Screenshots of an unnamed card appeared on China's Chiphell forums, so take them with the usual pinch of salt. They were shared on Twitter by user HXL (via VideoCardz). The 3DMark Time Spy Extreme score is a massive 20,192, suggesting this is the RTX 4090, which scored 19,000 in another leaked 3DMark Time Spy Extreme graphics test in July.

Assuming the screenshots are the real deal, the score makes the RTX 4090 90% faster than the Ampere equivalent, the RTX 3090. That lines up with previous reports of the Lovelace card being around twice as fast as its predecessor. It also makes the RTX 4090 78% faster than the current-gen RTX 3090 Ti flagship. Of course, synthetic benchmarks don't always totally reflect real-world performance, but the numbers are still promising.

The leak also shows the card reaching a 3,015 MHz frequency. For comparison, the RTX 3090 Founders Edition boosts to 1,695 MHz. According to the leaker, it has a default TDP of 450W, though it is designed for 600W to 800W. That lines up with a rumor in June claiming the RTX 4090 could have a power limit of 800W but a lower default TDP.

800W of power draw. Dang!

[weatheriscool]

Researchers create device to streamline interactions between ultra-cold computers and room-temperature ones
https://techxplore.com/news/2022-09-dev ... ature.html
by Harrison Tasoff, University of California - Santa Barbara

Many state-of-the-art technologies work at incredibly low temperatures. Superconducting microprocessors and quantum computers promise to revolutionize computation, but scientists need to keep them just above absolute zero (–459.67° Fahrenheit) to protect their delicate states. Still, ultra-cold components have to interface with room temperature systems, providing both a challenge and an opportunity for engineers

An international team of scientists, led by UC Santa Barbara's Paolo Pintus, has designed a device to help cryogenic computers talk with their fair-weather counterparts. The mechanism uses a magnetic field to convert data from electrical current to pulses of light. The light can then travel via fiber-optic cables, which can transmit more information than regular electrical cables while minimizing the heat that leaks into the cryogenic system. The team's results appear in the journal Nature Electronics.

[caltrek]

The thing about rapidly advancing technology is that it can often leave many people behind. Case in point:

Rural Internet access and usage lags behind metropolitan areas
by Monica Cordero
August 25, 2022

Introduction:

(Investigate Midwest) Although Internet use in rural areas has increased substantially over the past 20 years, a gap in urban and suburban areas remains.

Nine out of 10 rural adult residents use the Internet, according to the Pew Research Center's annual survey of Americans' Internet usage with data collected from 2000 to 2021. In urban and suburban areas, this rate reaches 95% and 94%, respectively.

Another study published by USDA's Economic Research Service, which uses data from 2015 to 2019, also shows that Internet access is lower in consistently poor rural counties. In these counties, Internet access decreases to 70% of households.

The importance of Internet use in U.S. households became more evident during the COVID-19 pandemic when education, work and commerce relied extensively on it.

Read more here: https://investigatemidwest.org/2022/08 ... an-areas/

[Yuli Ban]

[Nanotechandmorefuture]

Gotta love technology!

[weatheriscool]

New technique enables on-device training using less than a quarter of a megabyte of memory
https://techxplore.com/news/2022-10-tec ... abyte.html
by Adam Zewe, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Microcontrollers, miniature computers that can run simple commands, are the basis for billions of connected devices, from internet-of-things (IoT) devices to sensors in automobiles. But cheap, low-power microcontrollers have extremely limited memory and no operating system, making it challenging to train artificial intelligence models on "edge devices" that work independently from central computing resources.

Training a machine-learning model on an intelligent edge device allows it to adapt to new data and make better predictions. For instance, training a model on a smart keyboard could enable the keyboard to continually learn from the user's writing. However, the training process requires so much memory that it is typically done using powerful computers at a data center, before the model is deployed on a device. This is more costly and raises privacy issues since user data must be sent to a central server.

To address this problem, researchers at MIT and the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab have developed a new technique that enables on-device training using less than a quarter of a megabyte of memory. Other training solutions designed for connected devices can use more than 500 megabytes of memory, greatly exceeding the 256-kilobyte capacity of most microcontrollers (there are 1,024 kilobytes in one megabyte).

The intelligent algorithms and framework the researchers developed reduce the amount of computation required to train a model, which makes the process faster and more memory-efficient. Their technique can be used to train a machine-learning model on a microcontroller in a matter of minutes.

[raklian]

World’s fastest internet network has been upgraded to mind-boggling 46 Terabit/s

https://interestingengineering.com/scie ... 46-terabit

America's fastest internet has become faster. The Department of Energy's (DOE) dedicated science network, ESnet (Energy Science Network), has been upgraded to ESnet6, boasting a staggering bandwidth of 46 Terabits per second (Tbps). Before you get any ideas, hold up. For now, it's strictly for scientists.

[weatheriscool]

An efficient and highly performing memristor-based reservoir computing system
https://techxplore.com/news/2022-10-eff ... rvoir.html
by Ingrid Fadelli , Tech Xplore

Reservoir computing (RC) is an approach for building computer systems inspired by current knowledge of the human brain. Neuromorphic computing architectures based on this approach are comprised of dynamic physical nodes, which combined can process spatiotemporal signals.

Researchers at Tsinghua University in China have recently created a new RC system based on memristors, electrical components that regulate the flow of electrical current in a circuit, while also recording the amount of charge that previously flowed through it. This RC system, introduced in a paper published in Nature Electronics, has been found to achieve remarkable results, both in terms of performance and efficiency.

"The basic architecture of our memristor RC system comes from our earlier work published in Nature Communications, where we validated the feasibility of building analog reservoir layer with dynamic memristors," Jianshi Tang, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. "In this new work, we further build the analog readout layer with non-volatile memristors and integrate it with the dynamic memristor array-based parallel reservoir layer to implement a fully analog RC system."

The RC system created by Tang and his colleagues is based on 24 dynamic memristors (DMs), which are connected into a physical reservoir. Its read-out layer, on the other hand, is comprised of 2048x4 non-volatile memristors (NVMs).

"Each DM in the DM-RC system is a physical system with computing power (called a DM node), which can generate rich reservoir states through a time-multiplexing process," Tang explained. "These reservoir states are then directly fed into the NVM array for multiply-accumulate (MAC) operations in the analog domain, resulting in the final output."

[weatheriscool]

Sending 1.84 petabits of data per second via a fiber-optic cable over a distance of 7.9 km
https://techxplore.com/news/2022-10-pet ... ce-km.html
by Bob Yirka , Tech Xplore

A team of researchers with members from several institutions in Denmark, Sweden and Japan has developed a means for sending 1.84 petabits of data per second via a fiber-optic cable over 7.9 km. Their report is published in Nature Photonics.

As applications used across the internet mature, moving ever larger amounts of data has become a critical issue. In this new effort, the researchers have developed a single chip that is capable of handling nearly two petabits of data per second.

The chip the researchers built and demonstrated is based on the use of photonics rather than electronics. To transfer huge amounts of data quickly, they added technology to their chip that first splits an incoming data stream (from a laser) into 37 individuals lines that travel across individual threads in a fiber cable. But prior to sending, the data in each of the 37 streams was split into 223 individual chunks of data, each corresponding to a unique part of the optical spectrum.

This, the researchers noted, allowed for the creation of a frequency comb, by which data was transmitted in different colors through the fiber cable. In addition to transferring huge amounts of data quickly, it also prevents the data streams from interfering with each other. The researchers then put their chip into an optical processing device, which they describe as about the size of a matchbox—they describe the result as a "massively parallel space-and-wavelength multiplexed data transmission" system.

[weatheriscool]

You can literally bend this $2,000 computer screen with your hands to switch between a flat and curved display
Aaron Mok
Dec 30, 2022, 8:52 AM

A new bendable computer screen lets you take matters into your hands, literally, if you want a curved display.

Gaming hardware company Corsair unveiled its newest computer monitor earlier this month, the Xeneon Flex. It's the latest addition to its line of gaming monitors which is now available purchase for a whopping $2,000. 

The 45-inch OLED screen can be bent at a curve up to 800 millimeters by pulling the handles on each side forward, giving you the option to switch between a flat and curved display. Curved displays can make for a more immersive gaming experience, though some people also prefer them when working. 

https://www.businessinsider.com/bendabl ... ex-2022-12

[wjfox]

England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new homes

Jan 9, 2023, 5:18 PM GMT|

My years-long battle to get gigabit internet installed may soon be over, thanks to new rules introduced by the UK government that make it easier to install faster broadband into apartments and flats across the UK. Additionally, a new law has been introduced that requires new properties in England to be built with gigabit broadband connections, sparing tenants from footing the bill for later upgrades.

Amendments to Building Regulations 2010 were announced by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS) on January 6th that mandate new homes constructed in England to be fitted with infrastructure and connections required to achieve gigabit internet connectivity.

Connection costs will be capped at £2,000 per home, and developers must still install gigabit-ready infrastructure (including ducts, chambers, and termination points) and the fastest-available connection if they’re unable to secure a gigabit connection within the cost cap. The UK government estimates that 98 percent of installations will fall comfortably under that cap, so it’s likely been put in place to avoid spiraling chargings in remote, rural areas that need widescale line upgrades. Properties constructed in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland may be exempt from this new legislation as each country sets its own building regulations independently from England.

The new legislation was introduced on December 26th, 2022, following a 12-month technical consultation that indicated around 12 percent of 171,190 new homes constructed in England didn’t have gigabit broadband access upon completion. DCMS claims that gigabit broadband is currently available in over 72 percent of UK households and is targeting full nationwide gigabit-capable broadband coverage across the UK by 2030.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/9/23546 ... mes-policy

[raklian]

[ººº]

I want to test/see its durability.

[weatheriscool]

Performing matrix multiplications at the speed of light for enhanced cybersecurity
https://techxplore.com/news/2023-02-mat ... urity.html
by SPIE

"All things are numbers," avowed Pythagoras. Today, 25 centuries later, algebra and mathematics are everywhere in our lives, whether we see them or not. The Cambrian-like explosion of artificial intelligence (AI) brought numbers even closer to us all, since technological evolution allows for parallel processing of a vast amounts of operations.

Progressively, operations between scalars (numbers) were parallelized into operations between vectors, and subsequently, matrices. Multiplication between matrices now trends as the most time- and energy-demanding operation of contemporary AI computational systems. A technique called "tiled matrix multiplication" (TMM) helps to speed computation by decomposing matrix operations into smaller tiles to be computed by the same system in consecutive time slots. But modern electronic AI engines, employing transistors, are approaching their intrinsic limits and can hardly compute at clock-frequencies higher than ~2 GHz.

The compelling credentials of light—ultrahigh speeds and significant energy and footprint savings—offer a solution. Recently a team of photonic researchers of the WinPhos Research group, led by Prof. Nikos Pleros from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, harnessed the power of light to develop a compact silicon photonic computer engine capable of computing TMMs at a record-high 50 GHz clock frequency.