Supercomputer @ The Size Of Your Palm

Supercomputers may not necessarily be as big as a room. They could be no bigger than your mobile phone. A lot of things happen at the pace of an evolution, but a lot of things also happen just like the flip of a coin. Engineers from the University of Edinburgh have reportedly done that ‘flip of a coin’. They have made the announcement of their breakthrough finding after examining the behaviour of wires 1,000 times thinner than a human hair.

In order to create a powerful computer the size of a mobile phone, it is necessary to develop much smaller microchips which use thinner wire. But there were some inherent problems while heading towards that direction. But Edinburgh engineers have now devised a tool to help combat problems which can arise from wiring microchips much smaller than the ones we are used to today. This will help in the development of hand-held PCs and mobile phones as powerful as supercomputers; the findings will also help in the advancement of medical science.

Edinburgh researchers teamed up with colleagues from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany and the University of Rome, Italy, to look at how tiny wires behave when they are manipulated. They found that wires on a nanoscale - measured in millionths of a millimetre - behave quite differently from bigger wires.

Dr Michael Zaiser, Edinburgh's school of engineering and electronics, said, "Basically, we just tried to look at what would happen if we deformed a wire that is very, very small."