Spintronic computing is a step toward the ultimate: Quantum computing. So another step toward quantum computing comes as no surprise; but worth noting about the latest leap is that it is truly a European leap, and not just a British or a French or an Italian or German leap.

In light of such developments in processing technology, today’s processing power will seem paltry soon enough. Even so, it is already powerful enough to run software that will interpret between Japanese-speaking and English-speaking cell phone talkers. The technology appears ready to be marketed to cell phone companies, so it could be in stores in a matter of months. When it is, it will mark the start of a whole new era in both human and technical communications.

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Researchers at the University of Basel in Switzerland have developed a carbon nanotube transistor that could put electron spin into computer chips. Conventional chips encode information in the form of electronic charge. But the spin of an electron can, in principle, be used for the same purpose, with lower power consumption, higher speed, and, most importantly, the potential to do things, such as quantum computation, that conventional electronics can’t perform.

Half a Petaflop

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IBM’s Blue Gene/L supercomputer reached 280.6 teraflops — 280.6 trillion calculations a second — in October at the US Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where it is working alongside another supercomputer. Together, the two supercomputers apply a combined half a petaflop — half a quadrillion (1,000,000,000,000,000) calculations a second — to safeguard the US nuclear stockpile and maintain its capability without resort to underground nuclear tests.

Supercomputers are now a major tool not only in nuclear physics but also in a range of advanced biological applications, from genetics to drug discovery, as well as in astronomy, weather forecasting, and engineering design.

Another Quantum Leap

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University of Manchester researchers and a team of international colleagues have for the first time demonstrated how “qubit rings” — pieces of quantum information — can be linked together. The breakthrough could lead to the creation of quantum gates, from which it would be a relatively short step to a quantum computer.

Interpreter Cell Phone

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NEC Corporation has developed automatic Japanese-English/English-Japanese speech translation software for mobile phones. It was successfully tested on an available NEC processor for mobile phones, proving that it would work.

The software has a 50,000-word vocabulary and a lexical-rule-based machine translation engine that unites the vocabulary with grammar. A company press release provides the following specifics:

(1) A parallel, large-vocabulary, continuous speech recognition engine, which is built with a database consisting of a wide-range of conversation sounds and words that enables accurate speech recognition of spoken words.

(2) A lexical-rule-based, machine translation engine, which achieves high-performance translation of spoken words utilizing dictionaries/grammar, compiled from a wide range of language knowledge data.

(3) An advanced wave-concatenative speech synthesis engine, which realizes high-performance reading through an advanced, wave-concatenative speech synthesis method based on a wide-range of speech data.

(4) A total integration module that controls collaborative operation of the speech recognition engine, the machine translation engine, and the speech synthesis engine realizing automatic translation on a single processor for mobile phones.