Category Archives: Engineering

Microchip Cooling Innovation

New technology has dramatic chip-cooling potential for future computers

The Purdue University researchers, in work funded by Intel Corp., have shown that the technology increased the “heat-transfer coefficient,” which describes the cooling rate, by as much as 250 percent. “Other experimental cooling-enhancement approaches might give you a 40 percent or a 50 percent improvement,” said Suresh Garimella, a professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue. “A 250 percent improvement is quite unusual.”
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The experimental cooling device, which was fabricated on top of a mock computer chip, works by generating ions – or electrically charged atoms – using electrodes placed near one another. The device contained a positively charged wire, or anode, and negatively charged electrodes, called cathodes. The anode was positioned about 10 millimeters above the cathodes. When voltage was passed through the device, the negatively charged electrodes discharged electrons toward the positively charged anode. Along the way, the electrons collided with air molecules, producing positively charged ions, which were then attracted back toward the negatively charged electrodes, creating an “ionic wind.”

This breeze increased the airflow on the surface of the experimental chip. Conventional cooling technologies are limited by a principle called the “no-slip” effect – as air flows over an object, the air molecules nearest the surface remain stationary. The molecules farther away from the surface move progressively faster. This phenomenon hinders computer cooling because it restricts airflow where it is most needed, directly on the chip’s hot surface.

via: Purdue University’s Ionic Wind Engine

NSF Graduate Research Fellow Profiles

Over at my regular job I was finally able to get us to put into place something that I have wanted to for several years: profiles of past NSF Graduate Research Fellows [link broken, so link removed]. We started with probably the most famous and certainly the richest: Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin.

“Obviously everyone wants to be successful, but I want to be looked back on as being very innovative, very trusted and ethical and ultimately making a big difference in the world.”

Sergey Brin, Co-Founder of Google, graduated from University of Maryland with high honors in mathematics and computer science in 1993 and, as a NSF Graduate Research Fellow, went on to Stanford to further study Computer Science. Early in his graduate studies, he showed interest in the Internet, specifically data-mining and pattern extraction…

In his short executive biography, Brin [link broken, so link removed] lists the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship that supported him while at Stanford among his top achievements. Like NSF, Brin understands the importance of research in innovation, and sponsors it in part through Google’s “20% time” program – all engineers at Google are encouraged to spend 20% of their work time on projects that interest them.

Read the full NSF Fellow profile of Sergey Brin [link broken, so link removed].

Discover the Supercollider

The Biggest Thing in Physics

It has taken over 20 years, $8 billion, and the combined efforts of more than 60 countries to create this extraordinary particle smasher, the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, built and operated by CERN, the European physics consortium.
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When the machine is switched on for the first time at the end of this year, particles will make a lap around the LHC in less than one ten-thousandth of a second. Keeping those particles on track requires serious bending power from more than 1,200 superconducting magnets, each of which weighs several tons apiece. Each magnet must be kept at –456 degrees Fahrenheit—colder than the void between galaxies—requiring CERN to build the world’s biggest cryogenic system to handle the 185,000 gallons of liquid helium that will be used to chill the magnets.

Yet another interesting article on the LHC. See previous posts: New Yorker on CERN’s Large Hadron Collider – CERN Pressure Test Failure – CERN Prepares for LHC Operations

Best Research University Rankings – 2007

There are several rankings of universities. They can be interesting but also have obvious limitations. I find Shanghai’s Jiao Tong University’s the most interesting (especially the international nature of it). Their real focus seems to be in providing a way for China to get a feel for how they are progressing toward developing world class universities (interesting slide presentation on their efforts). The methodology values publications and faculty awards and is provides a better ranking of research (rather than teaching). Results from the 2007 rankings of Top 500 Universities worldwide showing country representation of the top schools:

location	Top 101	% of World Population	% of World GDP	% of top 500
USA	54	4.6%	27.4%	32.7%
United Kingdom	11	0.9	4.9	8.3
Germany	6	1.3	6.0	8.1
Japan	6	2.0	9.0	6.3
Canada	4	0.5	2.6	4.3
France	4	0.9	4.6	4.3
Sweden	4	0.1	0.8	2.2
Switzerland	3	0.1	0.8	1.6
Australia	2	0.3	1.6	3.3
Netherlands	2	0.3	1.4	2.4
Israel	1	0.1	0.3	1.4
Finland	1	0.1	0.4	1.0
Norway	1	0.1	0.6	0.8
Denmark	1	0.1	0.6	0.8
Russia	1	2.2	2.0	0.4
China		20.1	5.5	2.8
India		17.0	1.9	0.4

China has 1 ranked in the 151-202 range as do Taiwan, Korea and Brazil. Singapore has one in the 102-151 range. The other country without any in the top 101 with representation in the next 101 is Italy with 3 schools in the 102-151 range and 2 in the 152-202 range. India has 2 in the 305-401 range.

Top 10 schools (same schools as last year, Cambridge moved from 2nd to 4th):

Harvard University
Stanford University
University of California at Berkeley
Cambridge University
Massachusetts Institute of Technology(MIT)
California Institute of Technology
Columbia University
Princeton University
University Chicago
Oxford University

University of Wisconsin – Madison is 17th 🙂 My father taught there while I grew up.
Continue reading →

Great Speech by Marissa Mayer on Innovation at Google

Marissa Mayer speech at Stanford on innovation at Google (23 minute speech, 26 minutes of question and answers). She leads the product management efforts on Google’s search products- web search, images, groups, news, Froogle, the Google Toolbar, Google Desktop, Google Labs, and more. She joined Google in 1999 as Google’s first female engineer. Excellent speech. Highly recommended. Google top 9 ideas:

(inside these are Marissa’s thoughts) [inside these are my comments]

Ideas come from anywhere (engineers, customers, managers, executives, external companies – that Google acquires)
Share everything you can (very open culture)
Your Brilliant We’re Hiring [Google Hiring]
A license to pursue dreams (Google 20% time)
Innovation not instant perfection (iteration – experiment quickly and often)
Data is apolitical [Data Based Decision Making – common errors in interpreting data – read the related links too]
Creativity loves Constraints [process improvement and innovation]
Users not money (Google focuses on providing users what they want and believe it will work out)
Don’t kill projects morph them

So far every time I hear one of Google’s leaders speak I am happier that I own a bit of stock – this is another instance of that.

Young Engineers Build Bridges with Spaghetti

Young engineers build bridges with spaghetti:

Proving that spaghetti is not just for dinner, the students of Johns Hopkins University’s Engineering Innovation summer program used the noodles to build intricate, miniature bridges and then wrecked them — all in the name of science. On Friday afternoon, the eight high school students participating in the competition pitted their engineering know-how against one another to see whose bridge could hold the most weight before splintering into pieces. The competition closed out four weeks of study under the summer program, which was taught by Muhammad Kehnemouyi, a full-time physics professor at Montgomery College, and Fred Katiraie, a full-time math professor at Montgomery College.
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The last team to go consisted of Sruti Bharat, 17, of California, Rohan Bhale, 15, of Olney, and Justin Yin, 17, of Wheaton. The group put weight after weight on the bridge and attached another chain to add more weights, but the bridge remained in one piece.

After adding all the weights available to them, Katiraie ran into another room to retrieve more. The team’s bridge held almost 60 times its actual weight before splintering.

Aerogels – Cool Substances

First Prize for Weird

A solid that’s up to 99 percent gas, it is rigid to a light touch, soft to a stronger one, and shatters like glass if it’s put under too much pressure too quickly; it’s one of the most enigmatic of materials, as well as one of the most versatile.

It can withstand the heat of a direct flame; engineers use it for insulation on oil rigs and for warmth in the insoles of hiking boots worn in the coldest temperatures on Earth. NASA uses it to trap comet dust blowing through the universe at six kilometers per second.
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Nicknamed “frozen smoke” after its ethereal appearance, aerogel is neither frozen nor smoke. It’s also surprisingly low tech—it’s been known since 1931
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Together, these ingredients can form a structure that chemically resembles glass but is so full of whorls and crevices that one cubic centimeter has a total surface area equal to a football field’s. The lightest-weight solid in the world, aerogel weighs 1.2 milligrams per cubic centimeter—barely more than the air molecules around it. In fact, the material itself is almost entirely made of air, like a sponge that consists mostly of holes. Don’t let its lightness fool you: it’s strong. NASA photos show two grams of the material easily supporting a 2.5-kilogram brick.
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And because the aerogels pack an enormous surface area into a tiny volume, small pieces can clear out many liters of water. Kanatzidis’s aerogels sopped up so much mercury that they diluted a solution of 645 parts per million down to 0.04 parts per million. They had similar effects on lead and cadmium, two other pollutants.

The new aerogels aren’t ready for widespread use: they’re made with platinum, so they’re extraordinarily expensive. But if other metals can be used to make them instead (Kanatzidis says they can), chunks of them could be dropped into polluted water, removing contaminants.

Cool. NASA Aerogel FAQ

Authors of Scientific Articles by Country

The United States National Science Foundation published – Changing U.S. Output of Scientific Articles: 1988–2003.

In an unexpected development in the early 1990s, the absolute number of science and engineering (S&E) articles published by U.S.-based authors in the world’s major peer-reviewed journals plateaued.
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The unprecedented plateau in the number of U.S. S&E articles should not be confused with a decades-long and familiar decline in the U.S. share of the world’s S&E articles. As other states built up their S&E capabilities, the U.S. share of the world’s articles in natural sciences and engineering dropped from 38% in 1973 to 28% in 2003. This decline in share is not surprising, nor has it been viewed as a cause for concern. By many measures, including articles published in peer-reviewed journals, the United States has been the world’s leading scientific nation for decades and remains the world’s leading scientific nation.
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Although the U.S. share of the world’s influential articles dropped substantially, the United States remained dominant in this area. At the end of the period studied, U.S. institutions were at least partially responsible for half of the world’s influential articles; no other major publishing center approached this figure. Moreover, compared with other major publishing centers, a considerably higher percentage of total U.S. output was classified as influential.

NSF includes a great deal of interesting data along with commentary. One compelling area is that of the location of authors of the top 1% of the most cited papers. The USA leads with 64.6% in 1992 and 56.6% in 2003. European Union-15 (15 countries for this measure) 23.3% to 27.7% (interesting, not what I would have predicted – which would have been a decline, though a small one). Japan 4.2% to 5.3%. East Asia – 4 (China, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan) from .1 to 1.1% (and rising rapidly – .5% in 2001 to .8% in 2002) – interesting but not so surprising, basically what I would expect – rapid gains. All other countries: 7.8% in 1992 and 9.3% in 2003. I predict these figures will have to break out India sometime in the next 10 years – I wish they did now though I expect it is a fairly low figure. China will also be reported separately, I believe.

The NSF data includes all sorts of great stuff. For the same top 1% of cited articles by topic East Asia – 4 in Engineering/Technology: 1992 .9% – 2003 7.2% in Social Sciences 0.0% to .6% in Mathematics 1.3% to 5.6%. In Engineering/Technology the USA dropped from 63.3% to 45.4%.

This is more data supporting what I have said before Science Excellence and Economic Benefits:
Continue reading →

YouTube Architecture

This very interesting post by Todd Hoff gives an overview of the YouTube Architecture and thus some interesting ideas on large scale web application architecture.

Each video hosted by a mini-cluster. Each video is served by more than one machine.
* Using a a cluster means:
– More disks serving content which means more speed.
– Headroom. If a machine goes down others can take over.
– There are online backups.
* Servers use the lighttpd web server for video:
– Apache had too much overhead.
– Uses epoll to wait on multiple fds.
– Switched from single process to multiple process configuration to handle more connections.
* Most popular content is moved to a CDN (content delivery network):
– CDNs replicate content in multiple places. There’s a better chance of content being closer to the user, with fewer hops, and content will run over a more friendly network.
– CDN machines mostly serve out of memory because the content is so popular there’s little thrashing of content into and out of memory.
* Less popular content (1-20 views per day) uses YouTube servers in various colo sites.
– There’s a long tail effect. A video may have a few plays, but lots of videos are being played.

I have noticed a large increase in significant delays (taking 10-20 seconds to start playing) with YouTube in the last few months.

High Pay for Engineering Graduates – July 2007

From the National Association of Colleges and Employers survey , Starting Salary Offers to Class of 2007 Continue to Rise.

Degree	Average Salary Offer	Increase over 2006
Chemical Engineering	$59,361	5.4%
Civil Engineering	$48,509	5.4%
Computer Engineering	$56,201	4.8%
Computer Science	$53,396	4.1%
Mechanical Engineering	$54,128	4.6%
Electrical Engineering	$55,292	3.2%
Information sciences and systems	$50,852	4.6%

Economics was the next highest pay reported by NACE at $48,483. So once again engineering graduates are being paid well. Some other majors: Accounting – $46,718; English – $32,553 and Psychology $31,631.