Intel Unveils New Product Plans for High-Performance Computing

Intel Unveils New Product Plans for High-Performance Computing
During the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC), Intel Corporation announced plans to deliver new products based on the Intel Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture that will create platforms running at trillions of calculations per second, while also retaining the benefits of standard Intel processors.

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The crime of mental illness

The crime of mental illness
Canada needs to change its approach to mentally ill prisoners as correctional facilities worldwide contain a higher percentage of people with mental illness than the general population, states an editorial in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal) .

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What is the Contribution of a Clean Room towards effective Data Recovery

In a highly competitive world where one hard drive crash can wipe out an entire company from business, express precaution is taken to safeguard one’s data from leakage and theft.

This has more so become the rule in today’s world where a single data recovery loss situation can wreak irreparable damage that can in no way be reimbursed in terms of finances and the destruction caused.  This has prompted most of the data recovery companies to build up an infrastructure that can effectively and efficiently retrieve the lost data that has suffered deletion or mutilation. It is in this regard that Clean Rooms come into play.

The very concept of a Clean Room came into being in the early 60s, when the aeronautics industry started developing its high precision technology. Later on this idea spilt over to the other industries that required a similar environment for experimenting and preserving their finds and inventions.

A Clean Room is a specially designed working area where the environmental parameters like the quality of air, humidity, temperature and moisture are technically regulated and manipulated so as to protect the sensitive equipments, samples, apparatus and gadgets from getting contaminated by outside influence.

The size and expanse of the Clean Room depends on the requirement of the industry in question and can vary from an office cubicle to a relatively spacious room but its uniqueness lies in the fact that they can be permanent, modular or portable whichever suits the company.

Clean rooms have now made a niche for themselves in the industries that deal in bio-technology, nano-fabrication, space satellites, sterile medical devices, computer hardware, optics, silicon chips and microprocessors.

Clean rooms were first classified in the US in 1963 and from then on six categories have emerged ranging from Class 1 to Class 100,000. The classification is done on the basis of the number and size of particles allowed per unit volume of air inside the Clean Room. Closely tailing behind USA, UK came out with the British Standard 5295 in 1999 while the first ISO standard called ISO 14644-I was published in 1999. Ideally a Class 100 clean room contains not more than 100 particles of 0.5 microns or more per cubic foot of air and the calculations go likewise.

The technology that goes into preserving the Clean Room is tedious and complex but it’s every penny worth the effort. Every Clean room needs to maintain a laminar air flow so as to avoid turbulence and specially designed commodities, stationery, furniture and gadgets of specified quality are used. The trained and specialized professionals who work inside a clean room wear special gloves, face masks, head covers and bunny suits to prevent contamination.

The environment is kept dust-free and well-controlled by following an effective contamination control program which entails repeated filtering of the air using sets of special filters that remove particulate impurities that can cause any sort of harm. Specially designed filters called the HEPA (High Efficiency Particulate Air) filters are used to filter particles that may be as small as 0.3 microns.

Every data recovery software company with a reasonable market standing has a Clean Room as this is an essential infrastructure which no data recovery company can do without.  Since the Clean Rooms are used for the express purpose of dissecting the hard drive and physical servicing of the hard drive components even a small dust particle settling between the platters and the read/ write head can  cause the disk to crash. Thus the clean room maintains an ideal environment for opening, operating and repairing such electronic devices.

If your hard drive has crashed and other hardware components in your computer are ill functioning, bank on Stellar Information Systems Ltd, a pioneer data recovery company specializing in data recovery and data protection services for assistance.

Equipped with trained and expert data recovery professionals and an excellent Clean room facility, Stellar can effectively retrieve your data from such situations by applying top-notch proprietary tools and techniques.

The procedure they follow is simple yet result yielding. The hard drive is dissected and the nonfunctional components are replaced and made operational again. A thorough hard drive scan is conducted and the recoverable data is effectively and efficiently extracted with maximum efforts exercised to maintain the original format.

Mechanical Seal manufacturers Improving on Reliability

Historically, mechanical seal was designed with very flat, parallel faces, and nearly a century passed before this basic principle saw any notable change. New and emerging manufacturing technologies provide greater flexibility in seal design, the goal being greater reliability, even in the most demanding applications.

Seal OEMs are breaking new ground in their once-staid manufacturing practices. Historically, mechanical seals were designed with very flat, parallel faces, and nearly a century passed before this basic principle saw any notable change. During the past few decades, this tried and true sealing concept began evolving.

New and emerging manufacturing technologies provide greater flexibility in seal design, the goal being greater reliability, even in the most demanding applications.

Design considerations: Pressing two highly polished, optically flat sealing surfaces together forms the seal that minimizes process fluid leakage from between the rotating shaft and stationary casing. But things can go wrong and a mechanical seal can leak for a number of reasons. The seal face might chip or become pitted from improper wear or poor lubricants. It might warp under off-design conditions involving pressure or heat. Additionally, the state of the process fluid could change and clog or interfere with seal reliability.

Because downtime and repairs make leak-related maintenance so costly, seal manufacturers began experimenting with seal face geometry to minimize problems and improve performance.

New faces: Among the most common seal face modifications are hydropad grooves, a geometry that improves film formation between seal faces. This reduces heat generation and increases seal life. Microfeature face modifications such as groove technologies and wavy faces sculpt the seal surface to improve performance and extend the operating window. Laser machining technologies take the micromachining of seal topography to a new dimension. Features now can be contoured to sub-micron dimensions.

“Seal OEMs see laser technology as the engineer’s playground,” says Michael Huebner, a staff engineer at Flowserve Corp. “Features can now be designed that have the required accuracy with almost no limitation in the feature configuration. A surface can be altered to create areas that serve different operating functions, such as creating lift or surface tension, raising pressure or moving fluid. This was not possible even a few years ago.”

A vertical pump with an oil seal located at the bottom of the gearbox is an application that has proved challenging for years. Conditions such as oil viscosity and high speed aren’t conducive to extended flat seal face reliability. Flowserve reconciled this problem using laser micromachining to produce surface tension grooves and hydrodynamic lift. The surface tension bands form a hermetic seal. The faces are separated with a wavy face hydrodynamic lift that operates on atmospheric air. The result is a noncontacting seal that doesn’t leak, wear or generate heat.

Compensating now: Until seal technology is perfected to a flawless state, the best you can do is mitigate your risks. Innovative system diagnostics and failure analysis tools are good for problem correction as well as incident prevention. In the event one of your seals leaks or fails mechanically, focus on treating the cause, not the symptoms. A novel approach to root cause analysis is the Cause Mapping technique ThinkReliability developed. Rather than developing a proprietary analysis tool, the company leverages software that already resides on virtually every business computer today —— Microsoft Excel.

Using a workshop setting, ThinkReliability teaches organizations how to use Excel to produce easily understood failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) diagrams. This skill improves communication because the Cause Mapping results can be shared with others in the organization without the usual software and license constraints. The Cause Mapping approach empowers companies in any industry to diagnose seal system leaks, safety incidents, equipment failures and a host of other problems, then use this knowledge to prevent future failures.

Emerging innovations: “The future of mechanical seal will be very dynamic,” says Huebner. “The opportunity exists to move to smarter seals with a greater operating range and higher reliability. University research has created seal faces with built-in heat exchangers to efficiently dissipate seal heat. Nano-featured surface textures have been developed that show lowered resistance to fluid flow and may find their way into seal faces. Seals with passive and active control mechanisms controlled by nano-scale features are being considered.”

Study investigates craters formed by raindrops (w/ Video)

Study investigates craters formed by raindrops (w/ Video)
(PhysOrg.com) — Hiroaki Katsuragi and a team from Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan, have been investigating what happens when water drops of various sizes are allowed to fall from a height of 10 to 480 mm onto a granular target consisting of grains of silicon carbide with grain sizes ranging from four to 50 microns. They used a laser system to measure the radius and depth of each crater.

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