It keeps going..and going..and going..

Engineers find way to build a better battery

U.S. engineers have found a way to make lithium batteries that are smaller, lighter, longer lasting and capable of recharging in seconds.

The researchers believe the quick-charging batteries could open up new applications, including better batteries for electric cars.

And because they use older materials in a new way, the batteries could be available for sale in two to three years, a team from Massachusetts Institute of Technology reported on Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Current rechargeable lithium batteries can store large amounts of energy, making them long-running. But they are stingy about releasing their power, making them discharge energy slowly and require hours to recharge.

Scientists traditionally have blamed slow-moving lithium ions -- which carry charge across the battery -- for this sluggishness.

However, about five years ago, Gerbrand Ceder and a team at MIT discovered that lithium ions in traditional lithium iron phosphate battery material actually move quite quickly.

"It turned out there were other limitations," Ceder said.

Ceder and colleagues discovered that lithium ions travel through tunnels accessed from the surface of the material. If a lithium ion at the surface is directly in front of a tunnel entrance, it can quickly deliver a charge. But if the ion is not at the entrance, it cannot easily move there, making it less efficient at delivering a charge.

Ceder and colleagues remedied this by revamping the battery recipe. "We changed the composition of the base material and we changed the way it is made -- the heat treatment," Ceder said.

This created many smooth tunnels in the material that allow the ions to slip in and out easily. "The trick was knowing what to change," he said.

Using their new processing technique, the team made a small battery that could be fully charged in 10 to 20 seconds.

Ceder thinks the material could lead to smaller, lighter batteries because less material is needed for the same result.

Because they simply tinkered with a material already commonly used for batteries, it could be easily adapted for commercial use.

"If manufacturers decide they want to go down this road, they could do this in a few years," Ceder said.

One glitch, Ceder said, would be handling the extra surge of power. "All of the wiring has to get beefed up," he said.

Scientists use Playstation 3's to create a super computer

Computer hobbyists, geeks and researchers take note:
Two U.S. scientists have created a step-by-step guide on how to build a supercomputer using multiple PlayStation 3 video-game consoles.

The instructional guide, Which was posted online this week at ps3cluster.org, allows users with some programming knowledge to install a version of the open-source Linux operating system on the video consoles and connect a number of consoles into a computing cluster or grid.

The two researchers say the guide could provide scientists with another, cheaper alternative to renting time on supercomputers to run their simulations.

University of Massachusetts Dartmouth physics professor Gaurav Khanna first built the cluster a year ago to run his simulations estimating the gravitational waves produced when two black holes merged.

Frustrated with the cost of renting time on supercomputers, which he said can cost as much as $5,000 to run a 5,000-hour simulation, Khanna decided to set up his own computer cluster using PS3s, which had both a powerful processor developed by Sony, IBM and Toshiba, but also an open platform that allows different system software to run on it. Currently, PlayStation 3 gaming systems retail for about $400 (Canadian funds).

On the how-to-guide, Khanna says the eight-console cluster is roughly comparable in speed to a 200 node IBM Blue Gene supercomputer. Khanna says his research now runs using a cluster of 16 PS3s.

The fastest supercomputer in the world, IBM's Roadrunner supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory, has 3,250 nodes and is capable of 1.105 petaflops, or 1.105 quadrillion floating point operations per second, about 100,000 times faster than a home computer.

Massachusetts Dartmouth computer scientist Chris Poulin, who co-wrote the instructional manual with Khanna, wouldn't reveal the number of flops the system can achieve, but says that anecdotally, the cluster has allowed him to run simulations in hours, simulations that used to take days to perform on a powerful server computer.

Khanna is not the first researcher to use PS3s to simulate the effects of a supercomputer. The University of Stanford's Folding at Home project allows people to help with research into how proteins self-assemble — or fold — by downloading software onto their home PS3s, creating a virtual supercomputer. Their research is currently targeting proteins relevant to diseases such as Alzheimer's and Huntington's disease.

But the guide posted by Khanna and Poulin is the first that might allow someone to set up a supercomputer in their own home.

Poulin said there are two major practical issues, however, that might limit the practicality of a PS3 cluster supercomputer.

The first issue is power. He said the video-game consoles use about 200 to 300 watts per unit, so finding a room that could hook up eight of the consoles might be an issue for hobbyists, he says.

"I think if you put four or more than four of the systems on one plug you'd probably blow a fuse," says Poulin.

The second issue is memory. The console has only 256 MB of RAM, far less than most personal computers available right now. Poulin said that while the low memory wouldn't be a problem for straightforward computations, running multiple simulations or programs could tax the system. As a result, simulations running on the cluster would have to be tailored to consider the cluster's memory limitations.

Poulin said he hopes the project will help open doors to more partnerships between industry and universities that will lead to better access to supercomputing power.

"That's ultimately the goal here," he said. "We want to make things easier, no matter what kind of supercomputer you are using."