LAS VEGAS -- Some companies spend millions building huge booths and producing glitzy stage shows for the Consumer Electronics Show.

Perpetua, a little energy-device company in Corvallis, Ore., sent Jerry Wiant with a laptop and a few gadgets to set on a table.

That's all it took to hook me, though.

Wiant's demonstration of "energy harvesting" gizmos was one of the most intriguing things I saw at the massive event last week.

Maybe that's because the bigger companies were holding back this year, making it hard to find radically new products.

There were lots of improvements on display -- brighter TVs, thinner computers and faster memory cards -- but not many huge breakthroughs apparent on the show floor.

The annual gadget fest suggests that every year we should expect waves of exciting new products, but in reality the cycles of research, development and technological change are longer, and some years bring more iteration than innovation to Las Vegas.

Still, there were plenty of exciting new products and some far-out creations that left me excited about what's still around the corner.

Like Perpetua's technology for powering gadgets with body heat instead of batteries.

Drawing on research from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Perpetua developed thermoelectric devices that convert temperature differences in dissimilar metals into electricity.

Since 2005 the company has been selling these energy-harvesting systems for industrial use, where they may be attached to warm pipes to power sensor systems, for instance. A number of employees came to the company from Hewlett-Packard's Corvallis printer operation, and Perpetua's devices are built in a way similar to HP's inkjet hardware.

Now Perpetua is working on smaller, wearable versions that generate electricity just from a person's body heat. The National Science Foundation and Department of Homeland Security are helping fund the research. The company also partnered with Texas Instruments to add wireless connectivity to the devices.

Within a few years, Perpetua's wearable devices could be used to power consumer gadgets, starting with fitness sensors and medical devices.

To show the concept at CES, Wiant had a small thermoelectric generator connected to a digital watch. Pressing your finger on the generator provided enough heat to power the device. Also on display was a prototype armband.

Wiant's show booth -- really just a table with a display board -- was in a far corner dedicated to innovative startups.

I didn't realize Wiant's company was just down the road until we started talking. Then I also found out that the company was funded partly from the proceeds of a startup -- Internet marketing company TrafficLeader -- that Wiant sold to Seattle's Marchex in 2003. He was an early investor in Perpetua and became its vice president of marketing in 2008.

Friday, as he packed up, Wiant said he didn't have much time to tour the show because he was busy manning the booth.

But he said it was worthwhile, and Perpetua drew a lot of interest from potential business partners.

"I have a stack of cards about 20 deep that are serious opportunities, which is really good," he said.

If one or two of those contacts come forward with development funding, he said, Perpetua could release the wearable thermoelectric products in 2013 or 2014.

Maybe Wiant will be back in Vegas then with a bigger booth. It shouldn't be hard to miss -- if it can harvest the energy of 150,000 conventioneers looking for the next big thing.

An affiliate professor at the University of Washington today received the prestigious (and lucrative) Kyoto Prize for global achievement, for his pioneering work in materials science and engineering.

John Cahn, 83, was awarded the 27th annual Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology from Japan's Inamori Foundation. It comes with a 20-karat gold medal and a cash prize of about $625,000.

Cahn has received numerous awards, including the National Medal of Science in 1998. He has been a member of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Maryland since 1984 and is now an emeritus senior fellow.

The head of the NIST metallurgy division, Frank Gayle, explained that Cahn's work has contributed to metals, plastics and other materials used in all sorts of common products.

"John's developments in the theory and models of materials has given scientists tools to understand and make new materials ranging from metals to plastics to ceramics and glass," Gayle said in a prepared statement. "For instance, your smartphone or laptop computer might contain 100 different materials, and John's work has probably influenced the understanding and development of half of those."

The Kyoto Prize was awarded for his establishment of the theory of spinodal decomposition. The announcement cites his work, which began in the 1950s, when "researchers attempting to maximize the potential of alloy materials were forced to take a trial-and-error approach." Cahn and colleague John Hilliard at General Electric deveoped a "method to describe the process of phase separation."

Their equation "has played a key role in materials science and engineering, explaining phenomena as simple as the formation of frost patterns on a car's windshield -- and as complex as the clumping of galaxies in the early universe.led to a more systematic approach to materials development."

Cahn went on to establish a theory of "three-dimensional spinodal decomposition" that extended a theory formulated by Dr. Mats Hillert. The release continued:

"In addition to expanding Hillert's theoretical treatment into three dimensions, he incorporated an elastic strain-energy term, allowing alloy materials to be engineered for highly specific structural and functional characteristics. This theory has since found universal application in the design and production of better-performing metals, glass, semiconductors, polymers, and thermal materials requiring unique properties -- including extreme strength, thermal conductivity, pore permeability, heat resistance, and magnetism. Dr. Cahn's research findings have also laid the foundation for the phase-field method, one of the hottest research topics of recent years in the materials sciences. Taken as a whole, his work has spawned productive lines of research not only in metallurgy but also in physics, mathematics, chemistry, engineering, economics and demography."

This year's "basic sciences" Kyoto Prize went to Rashid Sunyaev, a Russian-German astrophysicist "and contributor to high-energy astronomy who proposed the theory that
fluctuations in cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) may be used to explore the
expanding universe." He's director of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, chief scientist at the Russian Academy of Science's Space Research Institute and a visiting professor at the Insititute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J.

The "arts and philosophies" award went to Tamasaburo Bando V, a Japanese Kabuki actor specializing in female roles. "Tamasaburo is known as a creator of elegant beauty whose artistry crosses many genres of the performing arts," the release said.

Here are a few pictures from a visit today with Paolo Feraboli, an assistant professor of aircraft materials and structures and director of the Lamborghini composites lab at the school.

One of these suspension pieces was developed at the lab for the Lamborghini Sesto Elemento prototype shown in Paris last year. Can you tell which one is made with forged carbon fiber?

Can you find the UW logo cast in the carbon Lamborghini suspension component held by Feraboli?

If you couldn't find the logo, here's a close-up. Alternatively, you may be able to peer into the car someday at the Lamborghini museum near Bologna, Italy.

This is a scale model of the carbon monocoque, demonstrating the casting approach that Lamborghini decided to use with its new $370,000 Aventador:

A full-size monocoque sits across the room, waiting for a V-12 and a few other pieces:

Feraboli found a great parking place for this Gallardo factory demo car:

The National Academy of Engineering today announced that it's adding 68 new members, including three from the Seattle area.

Altogether the academy now has 2,290 members chosen for outstanding contributons to engineering research, practice or education and "pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional fields of engineering, or developing/implementing innovative approaches to engineering education."

Locals named to the academy are:

-- James F. Albaugh, Boeing executive vice president and president and chief executive officer of its commercial airplane division. He was chosen for "for technical leadership in defense and commercial aerospace industry."

-- Susan T. Dumais, principal researcher in the adaptive systems and interaction group of Microsoft Research. She was chosen for "innovation and leadership in organizing, accessing, and interacting with information."

-- Henry M. Levy, Wissner-Slivka Endowed Chair in Computer Science and Engineering and department chair at the University of Washington. He was chosen for "contributions to design, implementation, and evaluation of operating systems, distributed systems, and processor architectures."

Drawing on the expertise of new faculty members and industry support, the University of Washington is starting a new foundry service for researchers developing silicon photonic chipsets.

The idea behind OpSIS - "optoelectronic systems integration in silicon" - is to help engineers and researchers working on different projects to share the cost of fabricating chip-scale systems.

It's modeled on a prototyping service called MOSIS that began operating at the University of Southern California in 1981 and has been widely used by students, companies and government labs working with microprocessors.

Leading the venture is nanotechnology researcher Michael Hochberg, assistant professor of electrical engineering and director of the UW's Institute for Photonic Integration.

Here's how the photonics lab describes its work:

We're interested in using the silicon photonics platform both to build interesting and important optical devices, and to explore new physical phenomena. Our projects span the space between very applied work on devices like ultra-low voltage electrooptic modulators, to interest in chip-scale nonlinear and quantum optics for novel light sources and all-optical logic circuits.

A kickoff event for OpSIS is scheduled for 3:30 p.m. Tuesday at the UW. In addition to Hochberg and engineering dean, Matt O'Donnell, speakers include semiconductor pioneer Carver Mead and Justin Rattner, Intel chief technology officer.

More details are available at the OpSIS Web site.

Here's a video, via the LA Times, of USC researchers using a hacked Kinect to play "World of Warcraft."

Mercer Island billionaire Paul Allen today renewed his effort to sue Apple, Google, Facebook, eBay, AOL and other companies for patent infringement.

Allen's case was rejected on Dec. 10 by a federal judge in Seattle who said it was too vague. U.S. District Court Judge Marsha Pechman told Allen he had until Dec. 28 to file an amended suit.

Just meeting the deadline, Allen filed an expanded version of the original suit with more details of how the companies allegedly infringed. The filing also includes 40 exhibits, many of which are screenshots of Web sites with modules highlighted.

Here's the filing: 2010-12-28 Interval First Amended Complaint for Patent Infringement (2).pdf

The companies being sued declined to comment on the allegations when the suit was first filed in late August.

Experts have said Allen's case is a longshot but the potential payoff is large - perhaps $500 million or more if he wins.

Defendants named in the suit are Apple, Google, Facebook, eBay, AOL, Netflix, Yahoo, Google's YouTube, OfficeMax, Office Depot and Staples.

Patents at issue in the case were generated by Interval Research, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based research venture that Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, and Xerox veteran David Liddle started in 1992. Allen closed it down in 2000.

Allen's suit alleges that his patents cover, among other things, systems that automatically call up and display related content. The approach is widely used by online retailers and other sites across the Web.

For instance, when viewing a product on Apple's iTunes store, the store automatically suggests related content that may be of interest. The suit filed today argues that this infringes on at least 20 claims made by a patent Allen holds.

Here's the exhibit submitted to illustrate the Apple violations:

One of the coolest and most mysterious high-tech gadgets around has to be Boeing's X-37B rocket ship.

The robotic mini-space shuttle completed its first flight today after more than a decade of secretive development. Its landing came after more than 220 days in space on an "experimental test mission."

Boeing announced "the successful de-orbit and landing" but didn't say much else in a one-paragraph press release today.

Here's the whole thing:

Boeing [NYSE: BA] today announced the successful de-orbit and landing of the Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV), also known as the X-37B, for the U.S. Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office (RCO). The X-37B, shown here in a photo from before its launch, landed at 1:16 a.m. Pacific time today, concluding its more than 220-day experimental test mission. It was launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., on April 22.

Air Force officials involved in the project weren't sure how long the X-37 could stay in space, where it draws energy from folding solar panels, according to this Los Angeles Times story from April.

Boeing provided a few more details in a 2001 release, back when the X-37 was only intended to fly in space for up to three weeks. It said then that the vehicle would "serve as a test bed for 40 airframe, propulsion and operation technologies designed to make space transportation and operations significantly more affordable. Potential new commercial and military reusable space vehicle market applications for these technologies range from on-orbit satellite repair to the next-generation of totally reusable launch vehicles."

The 29-foot craft was then designed to have a 7-by-4-foot bay for conducting experiments. Its modular design was intended to "allow testing of both current and future technologies within the same vehicle, providing long-term cost savings."

Now we know what Charles Simonyi wants for Christmas.

Here is a video we produced from the annual science fair held at Intel Labs Seattle research center near the University of Washington.

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen today filed a lawsuit against many of the biggest names in tech, alleging they're infringing on patents obtained by Interval Research, a venture Allen and Xerox veteran David Liddle started in 1992.

Interval's research generated about 300 patents, four of which are the basis of the suit. The group operated in Palo Alto, growing to more than 100 researchers, until it was shuttered in 2000.

Named as defendents are Apple, Google, Facebook, eBay, AOL, Netflix, Yahoo, Google's YouTube, OfficeMax, Office Depot and Staples.

Most of the companies declined to comment, but Facebook said the suit's without merit and a Google spokesperson said it's part of an "unfortunate trend of people trying to compete in the courtroom instead of the marketplace."

If Allen is successful, he could go after additional companies, seeking royalties for Interval patents that touch on much of the current Web experience.

One of the patents in the suit lays claim to the concept of automatically showing related information on a website, so people viewing a news story online could be presented with related stories, for instance.

"The invention enables some or all of a body of information to be skimmed quickly, enabling a quick overview of the content of the body of information to be obtained," states a 2001 patent for "browser for use in navigating body of information." "The invention also enables quick identification of information that pertains to a particular subject."

Allen has already tried to make money with that concept, starting a company called Evri, which developed a widget that media sites could embed into their sites and generate clusters of related stories.

It's unclear at this point how Allen sought to license the technology. Asked whether the lawsuit follows attempts to negotiate licensing deals with the named companies, Allen's spokesman David Postman said, "The defendants were informed that we had patents of interest."

The belated pursuit of compensation for research conducted more than a decade ago puts Allen at risk of being labeled a patent troll. Postman characterized the move as "part of an ongoing process for years to monetize that portfolio."

"Other patents were licensed to other people," Postman said. "Now we're to the point of reviewing that portfolio and seeing at the same time if technology in the marketplace has caught up to where Interval was. It's clear that these patents cover a variety of key processes in search and e-commerce. We're to the point where litigation is the next step on that."

Within Allen's circle of billionaire Microsoft veterans is Nathan Myhrvold, who started a Bellevue company called Intellectual Ventures that collects patents and makes money charging licensing fees. Bill Gates is invested in the group and helping with its research.

Intellectual Ventures' rise contributed to the debate over reforming the U.S. patent system and raised questions about how much the system encourages innovation vs. enriching license holders.

But Postman said Allen's situation with Interval is different, partly because Interval was formed to be a research organization developing new technologies for the "wired world" Allen envisioned. Postman also denied that Allen is enforcing his patents at the suggestion of Myhrvold or others.

"Ever since Interval was operating he's known there was value in those patents," Postman said. "That's why he was able to sell some, spin some off and license others. It is not at all a case of someone influencing him to do this. This was driven by Paul's interest in protecting his interest in innovation."

Facebook, at least, is going to fight back hard. The company's statement, provided by spokesman Andrew Noyes:

"We believe this suit is completely without merit and we will fight it vigorously."

A spokeswoman for eBay provided a similar statement, saying "we are reviewing the complaint filed today. We intend to defend ourselves vigorously."

An Office Depot spokesman said the company doesn't comment on pending litigation. AOL also declined to comment.

Google's statement said, "This lawsuit against some of America's most innovative companies reflects an unfortunate trend of people trying to compete in the courtroom instead of the marketplace. Innovation -- not litigation -- is the way to bring to market the kinds of products and services that benefit millions of people around the world."

Microsoft is not named in the suit. The company has not obtained licenses to use the technology, according to Postman.

Postman declined to say why the lawsuit went after particular companies, but said more companies could be pursued later.

"The companies that were named today all were informed of the patents that we hold," he said.

The patents at issue involve navigating with a browser for information, capturing a computer user's attention and alerting users to information. They were filed starting in 1996 but some weren't approved until as late as 2004.

Specifically, the patents cover:

-- "Browser for Use in Navigating a Body of Information, With Particular Application to Browsing Information Represented By Audiovisual Data."

-- "Attention Manager for Occupying the Peripheral Attention of a Person in the Vicinity of a Display Device."

-- "Alerting Users to Items of Current Interest."

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Seattle, also mentions that Interval was an early supporter of Google's founders.

For example, Interval Research served as an outside collaborator to and provided research funding for Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page's research that resulted in Google. Indeed, a Google screenshot dated September 27, 1998 entitled "About Google!" identifies Interval Research in the "Credits" section as one of two "Outside Collaborators" and one of four sources of "Research Funding" for Google. See Sept. 27, 1998 Website "About Google!" attached as Exhibit 1.

Just ahead of next week's public unveiling of its Project Natal motion control system for the Xbox 360, Microsoft has filed for several patents covering technology for controlling PCs and game systems with gestures and motion tracking.

The patent applications reiterate that Microsoft's work on gesture input systems predate Natal and go far beyond the game console. They also makes it clear that this technology is no longer the realm of science fiction as in the movie "Minority Report."

The applications don't mention Natal specifically but describe related technology for controlling systems with depth-sensing cameras and voice commands that serve as interfaces to control computers with large visual displays.

They describe a system that could also use a wireless sensor along with the 3-D sensors and voice control.

"MSR [Microsoft Research] has been working on this for a long, long time,'' said Andy Wilson, a Microsoft researcher named on the applications. "Now that the buzz has been turned up a couple notches around Natal, it's good to keep in mind that we've been doing this stuff for a long time."

Blogger Manan Kakkar called out the application for a PC control system that was published today.

When I looked into it, I found a related application for a "system and method for executing a game process" published June 3. It involves "a 3-D imaging system for recognition and interpretation of gestures to control a computer. The system includes a 3-D imaging system that performs gesture recognition and interpretation based on a previous mapping of a plurality of hand poses and orientations to user commands for a given user."

Natal captures all sorts of motion by tracking players' skeletons and overlaying voice commands. It also draws on the vast library of research Microsoft has done over the years.

The patent applications describe a standard set of gestures that can be combined with voice control and the use of a remote sensing device. It also hints at what could be one of the challenges with Natal -- remembering particular control gestures, and the complexity of recognizing and processing such inputs.

The computer application is for a "perceptual user interface" architecture that "comprises alternative modalities for controlling computer application programs and manipulating on-screen objects through hand gestures or a combination of hand gestures and verbal commands. The perceptual user interface system includes a tracking component that detects object characteristics of at least one of a plurality of objects within a scene, and tracks the respective object."

From the application:

"A small set of very simple gestures can offer significant bits of functionality where they are needed most. For example, dismissing a notification window can be accomplished by a quick gesture to the one side or the other, as in shooing a fly. Another example is gestures for 'next' and 'back' functionality found in web browsers, presentation programs (e.g., PowerPoint) and other applications.

Note that in many cases the surface forms of these various gestures can remain the same throughout these examples, while the semantics of the gestures depends on the application at hand. Providing a small set of standard gestures eases problems users have in recalling how gestures are performed, and also allows for simpler and more robust signal processing and recognition processes."

A few images from the applications:

(Today's piece, keyed to the Society for Information Display conference in Seattle ...)

Talk about gazing into the future.

Imagine ultra high-definition TVs not much thicker than a millimeter.

How about electronic books made with plastic screens that flex like a magazine?

Or perhaps a display that lets you touch a virtual version of yourself on the other side of the glass?

At the Grand Challenges Summit in Seattle today, the University of Washington's Ed Lazowska channeled Bill Gates.

Lazowska resurrected Gates' "digital decade" line to describe the advances that computer science will bring to scientific research.

"You're going to see a revolution in discovery in the next 10 years," said Lazowska, the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science.

He opened a discussion of "eScience" and new systems for doing research with massive amounts of data, a "looming data tsunami" that's pushing scientists to develop shared computing clusters at schools and ultrafast dedicated Internet lines between research centers.

Dedicated supernetworks are needed to handle data generated by systems such as gene sequencers that produce a terabyte of data per day -- and the UW has 25 of them -- or the Hadron Collider, which produces 20 petabytes of data per year.

Among the speakers in the session, part of a National Academy of Engineering event hosted by the UW, was Facebook data architect, Jonathan Chang, who said the social network's vast data could be a boon to social scientists.

Chang said the site has the "richest social data set in the world," with more than a petabyte of data about its users and more than 1 terabyte generated every day.

This has the potential to "really get to and anwer a lot of the longstanding questions in things like social science, which we've been unable to answer before." It's also easier to slice Facebook data than it is to do conduct surveys.

Among the tidbits revealed by Chang were terms used in discussions of vodka. Younger males tend to use the word "drunk" and older females mention "cranberry" when discussing vodka, for instance.

Plotting the terms "party" and "hangover," the data show people mention party regularly on Saturdays, and on Sundays people mention "hangovers" "with incredible regularity," he said.

More seriously, the site's also done work correlate negative and positive sentiment in status updates with surveys of users' self-reported happiness. Survey responses were predictive of status updates," he said.

Catharine van Ingen, an architect in Microsoft Research's eScience group, said there's an amazing flow of data from satellites, sensors, computers and Web services.

"While we're at the center of this perfect storm," she said, "there's a lot of challenges left turning those ones and zeroes into actual science."

A schedule is out for the National Academy of Engineering's Grand Challenge Summit taking place May 2 and 3 in Seattle, a high-profile gathering of students and engineers in the aerospace, computing and biotech industries.

The forum is one of six being held across the country this year to discuss challenges that engineering may help solve in the coming decades. It starts at the University of Washington and concludes at the convention center downtown.

"This is a unique event to talk about what it really means to be an engineer in the 21st century, and how engineering and related disciplines are going to affect life in the coming years," Matt O'Donnell, dean of engineering, said in the release. "For students, it's a chance to discuss the issues that will define their careers. For others, it's an opportunity to learn about fundamental issues for our society in the 21st century."

Seattle's event will focus on the challenges to "Engineer better medicines" and "Engineer the tools of scientific discovery," including computing tools for data-intensive science and space exploration, the release said.

Speakers include representatives of Seattle's PATH, Microsoft Research, Google, General Electric, Gilead Sciences and Facebook.

Also speaking are a former NASA administrator and former astronaut Bonnie Dunbar, who now heads the Museum of Flight, as well as professors from the UW, University of Texas, University of California at San Diego and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

They'll address questions such as:

-- How will emerging medical technologies, which span both a device and a drug, be regulated?

-- How can genetic therapies become a reality?

-- Is the future of aerospace innovation in the public or private sector?

-- Can we continue to send humans into space, or should we send only robots?

-- How will we store and make sense of the flood of data generated by modern science?

Registration before April 19 is $100, or $75 for academics or $20 for students. After April 19, prices are $175, $125 and $20 for students. Here's a UW engineering site with more details.

Here are a few pictures and videos from yesterday's TechFest preview hosted by Microsoft Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie.

Here's a video of Mundie demonstrating a 3-D climate-change model that's controlled with gestures and voice commands. The model was created with the Microsoft Computational Science Studio, a research tool for quickly building and visualizing complex models with massive datasets, developed at the company's lab at Cambridge University. (The video doesn't do justice to the 3-D presentation, but you can see the gesture and voice control in action.)

A charging tray in Microsoft's eHome prototype gallery that also displays information from devices such as watches and phones:

Jonathan Cluts, general manager of eHome, showing a display system that projects a kids' party game onto a dining room table. Each guest can fly a biplane around the table, controlling them by holding their hands over controls projected at their "place setting." A scene with planes zooming around is also projected onto the wall:

The "Project Gustav" demonstration at TechFest, with realistic brush deformation captured on an input tablet:

A working prototype of the "Cloud Mouse" for navigating cloud computing interfaces:

Demonstrating how a doctor could use a Surface computer to analyze images and compare them with images drawn from the Web is Dr. Michael Gillam, director of Microsoft's Healthcare Innovation Lab in Washington, D.C.

The TechFest preview included visits to handful of booths set up in Microsoft's on-campus conference center showing research done in Redmond and at labs in Europe and Asia.

One focused on prototype input systems worn on the arm, including one called "Skinput" that projected virtual buttons onto the skin, so a computer could be controlled with taps along an arm or even on the side of a coffee cup held in the hand.

Microsoft researcher Desney Tan demonstrated a system using armbands with muscle sensors that worked as computer interfaces. Instead of clicking a button or touching a screen, users move their fingers and hands to control input and the bands worked by sensing muscle activity.

Tan demonstrated the system by playing "air guitar" to control the "Guitar Hero" game.
There was no word on when the arm devices could become real products, but Rick Rashid, senior vice president of research, noted that this sort of prototype demonstration leads to products such as the Xbox Natal controller.

Other demonstrations included a system for realistically rendering brush strokes on a computer, using sensors in a pad on which the user "paints," and a gyroscopic "cloud mouse" used for navigating 3D interfaces that may be used to present rich data from online "cloud" services.

Researchers also showed a phone system that simultaneously transcribes and translates voice conversations in real time. The transcription feature is coming soon to Microsoft's Exchange messaging system but the translation feature is still being developed.

A remote datacenter handles the translation and transcription so the service works with most any device, and it continuously trains itself to better understand individual users.

Here's Tan demonstrating the "Always Available Input With Muscle Computer Interfaces":

How do you wow the crowd of uber geeks gathered in Seattle this week for the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics conference on parallel processing for scientific computing?

IBM's trying with a new algorithm for processing the enormous pools of data the world's generating nowadays, drowning scientists and their supercomputers.

The company says the formula developed by its Zurich-based researcher Costa Bekas reduces the complexity and cost of analyzing huge datasets by two orders of magnitude.

From the announcement:

"The new method was tested on the fourth largest supercomputer in the world and what would normally have taken a day, was crunched in 20 minutes. In terms of energy savings, the analysis required 700 kilowatts total, compared with 52800 kilowatts total."

Testing was done on a Blue Gene/P system in Germany. The setup accurately validated 9 terabytes of data in less than 20 minutes, a process that would ordinarily take more than a day.

Bekas is presenting his findings this afternoon at the conference at the Grand Hyatt.

Here's a clever picture IBM provided of Bekas writing part of the algorithm on glass: