Lego: It’s not really a secret that Lego building blocks are widely loved. They’re perfect for any age, but a particularly fun gift for an engineering or physics nerd who lacks some brightly-coloured fun. Whether you go for a Millennium Falcon, a Mindstorms NXT robot set, or a smaller kit, just be sure your beloved recipient has time for construction. Prices vary widely. [Lego; Image Source]

BuckyBalls: 216 pellet-shaped rare earth magnets may scream “physics lesson”, but in reality they’re a jar full of fun. Your science nut can construct all sorts of 3D shapes for hours of mindless — or extremely brain-intensive — entertainment. And should he ever manage to get bored with the balls, he can just use them for one heck of a refrigerator magnet collection. $US30 [Gizmodo; Busted Tees]

DON’T BUY A Star: I don’t know how you could imagine that getting someone a sheet of paper proclaiming that you’ve named a star after her is a clever idea. It’s a scam to begin with and even the most thoughtless gift certificate would be a better idea (and won’t leave you stuttering that you thought she “likes space and umm… stuff”).

Photo by jared

I’ve never seen a stocking that didn’t like being filled with a bit of awkward science-themed, cotton-based humour and somehow science nerds in particular have a soft spot for geeky shirts. You can head to ThinkGeek, Threadless and Snorg Tees if you’re looking for some of the shirts we’ve mentioned in the past — my personal favourite is still the ingredient shirt. $US19 [Snorg Tees]

Chemistry Experiment Kit: This one’s more geared to the younger lab rats, but no science nerd should miss out on a proper chemistry set. This C3000 set is a nice splurge and even guides you through building a DIY fire extinguisher for when experiments go wrong, but you can certainly go for a smaller kit or even put one together on your own. $US230 [Scientifics]

Casio EX-FC100: Science types want to document the entire world in pictures and video. Thanks to technological advancements, falling prices and MythBusters, high-speed slow-mo photography has carved out a nerdy niche in recent years. Casio’s EX-FC100 may not be an EX-F1, but it’s nice and small and has most of that slow mo covered, plus some nice nature-watcher tricks in still shooting, too. Despite the fact that still picture quality isn’t as high as a similarly sized Canon, the FC100’s set of unique talents make it a worthwhile toy for active observers of the physical world. $US226 [Review; Casio Exilim]

Giant Plush Microbes: If you’re in need of a stocking stuffer for a biology nerd, these plush microbes are a sure thing. They’re cute (just look at syphilis!) and add a bit of silliness to many all-too-serious subjects. $US12 [Think Geek]

Processing Time on a Supercomputer: If you’ve got a mad, crazy, number-crunching, super science nerd on your hands — along with your own pretty thick wallet — then you can go through a company like Exa and get them some quiet time with a supercomputer. Your nerd will be able to run her insane calculations using high-performance computing and save quite a bit of time, so be sure to have some hot chocolate for two ready for a calm evening after. Prices vary, but they’re gonna clean out your pockets. [Exa]

Photo by Argonne National Laboratory

Don’t forget to recommend your own favourite gift ideas for science nerds in the comments.

All Giz Wants is our annual round-up of favourite gift ideas, including amazing attainable objects and a few far-out fantasies. We’ll be popping guides catered to different interests several times per day for the next week, so keep checking back.

Cats: they’re kinda dumb. They only seem smarter than dogs because they’re not so friendly, and our society judges kindness harshly. It’s a true and interesting theory! Which is why, after mice, simulating a feline-sized brain on a BlueGene/P supercomputer was next on IBM’s to-do list. But for all the kitty talk here, this project wasn’t specifically about creating a computerised house pet; it’s part of a larger, ongoing project to eventually simulate a full human brain. The cat equivalency, derived from the number of virtual neurons and synapses the simulation can manage, at 1.6 billion and 9 trillion, respectively, just gives a sense of how far along the project is: Today, despite being the biggest simulated brain ever, it’s only capable of simulating the human visual cortex, or as PopMech so delicately puts it, “the wrinkly outer layer” of the human brain.

So how long before a supercomputer can simulate (roughly — since these computer simulations don’t have the same neural patterning and learning capabilities of a real brain, among other things) an entire human cortex? Weirdly soon, says the project’s lead scientist:

To [simulate a human cortex], he’ll need to find 1000 times more computing power. At the rate that supercomputers have expanded over the last 20 years, that super-super computer could exist by 2019. “This is not just possible, it’s inevitable,” Modha says. “This will happen.”

People need to stop getting worked up about the future, honestly: Before we have to worry self-aware robot uprisings, we’re going to have to deal with decades of extremely dumb, extremely expensive fake pets. Enforced caution, I believe this is called. [Popular Mechanics]

Then it surpassed IBM’s 10.4 petaflop/s supercomputer, achieving its 1.74 quadrillion floating points operation according to the Top500 Linpack benchmark. I mean, it was probably some extra CPUs coming online, but I’m pretty sure the main reason for the boost was that drawing.

Roadrunner actually took a dip from June’s 2009 test, which gave it 1.105 petaflops. That’s probably Wile E. Coyote’s fault. My recommendation to IBM: Paint flames on it to win the #1 spot back.

This is the current top 10:

1. Jaguar, Cray, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA (1.75 petaflop/s)
2. Roadrunner, IBM, Los Alamos National Laboratory, USA (1.04 petaflop/s)
3. Kraken XT5, Cray, National Institute for Computational Sciences, USA (832 teraflop/s)
4. JUGENE, IBM, Forschungszentrum Juelich, Germany (825.5 teraflop/s)
5. Tianhe-1, NUDT, National SuperComputer centre, Tianjin, China (563.1 teraflop/s)
6. Pleiades, SGI, NASA Ames Research centre, USA (544.3 teraflop/s)
7. BlueGeneL, IBM, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, USA (478.2 teraflop/s)
8. BlueGene/P, IBM, Argonne National Laboratory, USA (458.61 teraflop/s)
9. Ranger, Sun, Texas Advanced Computing centre, USA (433.20 teraflop/s)
10. Red Sky, Sun, Sandia National Laboratories, USA (423.9 teraflop/s)

[Top500 Supercomputers via Cnet]

To put that in perspective, 10 megawatts is the kind of energy a small hydroelectric plant produces — 20 watts is only enough juice to power up a weak light bulb. Amazingly, your physical brain runs on this minuscule amount of power, and it’s not very efficient. However, embracing this inefficiency could be the key to creating computers that mimic the human brain.

It sounds cockamamy, but it is true. Scientists have found that the brain’s 100 billion neurons are surprisingly unreliable. Their synapses fail to fire 30 per cent to 90 per cent of the time. Yet somehow the brain works. Some scientists even see neural noise as the key to human creativity. Boahen and a small group of scientists around the world hope to copy the brain’s noisy calculations and spawn a new era of energy-efficient, intelligent computing. Neurogrid is the test to see if this approach can succeed.

Most modern supercomputers are the size of a refrigerator and devour $US100,000 to $US1 million of electricity per year. Boahen’s Neurogrid will fit in a briefcase, run on the equivalent of a few D batteries, and yet, if all goes well, come close to keeping up with these Goliaths.

So far Boahen has managed to squeeze a million neurons onto his new supercomputer compared to only 45,000 last year. By 2011, he hopes to have 64 million up and running, bringing the project to the equivalent of a mouse’s brain.

Ditching reliability and efficiency in favour of organised chaos flies in the face of everything that an engineer holds dear, but the approach does make sense — and reducing the power consumption is the key to upholding Moore’s law. But how will this development change our perception of what an artificially intelligent robot might become? Instead of some cold, logical machine that can think for itself, we might end up with robots that are just as stupid and flawed as we are. Think about it. [Discover Mag via PopSci]

Octane III is office-ready with a pedestal, one-by-two-foot form factor, whisper-quiet operations, easy-to-use features, low maintenance requirements and support for standard office power outlets. While a typical workstation has only eight cores and moderate memory capacity, the superior design of the Octane III permits up to 80 high-performance cores and nearly 1TB of memory for unparalleled performance…

Octane III is easily configurable with single- and dual-socket node choices, and offers a wide selection of performance, storage, graphics, GP-GPU and integrated networking options. Yielding the same leading power efficiencies inherent in all SGI Eco-Logical compute designs, Octane III supports the latest Intel processors to capitalise on greater levels of performance, flexibility and scalability.

For about $US8000, it’s not cheap by normal computer standards, but by supercomputer standards it’s a bargain. [SGI via The Inquirer via Boing Boing]

So what’s all that actually mean? IBM offered us some more tangible ways to wrap your mind around 20 quadrillion mathematical processes per second.

• If each of the 6.7 billion people on earth had a hand calculator and worked together on a calculation 24 hours per day, 365 days a year, it would take 320 years to do what Sequoia will do in one hour.

• 20 petaflops could offer a 50x improvement in our capability to predict earthquakes, allowing scientists to predict an earthquake’s effects on a building-by-building basis across an area as large as Los Angeles County.

• 20 petaflops could also provide a 40x improvement in our capability to monitor and forecast weather. This would allow forecasters to predict local weather events that affect areas 100 meters to one kilometer in size, down from their current ten-kilometer ability.

The Sequoia will be powered by 1.6 million cores (specific 45-nanometer chips in development) and 1.6 petabytes of memory. It will be housed in 96 refrigerators spanning roughly 3,000 square feet.

It’s for the U.S. Government who will use the system for “uncertainty quantification (UQ) studies” and weapon science calculations. [IBM Supercomputing]

The Mysterious Case of the Disappearing Atom Mass

The night that the Frenchy called me I didn’t have any plans. Susan took the day off for shopping. Something about new stockings. I said yes. She never seemed to have enough of those. I never had enough of her in them either. Taking her down to the club for the usual bourbon and dancing was out of the question. Maybe that’s why I said yes to Lellouch. I never was fond of the froggies. Not even while I was shooting Nazis in Normandy.

Laurent Lellouch. That was the name. I liked it as much as the sound of the case he wanted me to take: Nothing at all. Something about a war between gangs of Prussian gangsters, the Neutrons and the Protons. I didn’t know them. It was all weird and related to that stuff they did at Los Alamos and then dropped in Japan. I knew Uncle Sam wasn’t going to be far behind this one, but Louis said he was ok to trust him. A bit. I didn’t have anything better to do, anyway. Pork chili down at George’s while listening to what Lellouch had to tell me was a better plan than going with the boys to the 42nd. I looked out the window and saw it was still raining nails. Hot chilli was it.

When I arrived, Lola nodded behind the bar and looked to the table where the guy was waiting. She rolled her eyes and shouted the usual order to George at the kitchen. The Frenchman was nervous, mumbling something about international conspiracies and computers and that guy from Germany who turned everything inside out with his theories. That equation. E=mc2. The told me about the protons and the neutrons. While I was downing my chilli he went on and on about it. Inside those families there were quarks, which are bound by gluons. I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. The mass of a gluon is zero, he said, while the mass of the quarks is only five percent. So, where is the missing 95 percent?

Maybe he was onto something. I finished my chilli, dropped a couple of Washingtons, and went on to see Janos the Hungarian. He wasn’t going to talk. Fortunately for him, I’m a reasonable man. It was nothing that a simple knuckle kiss couldn’t fix. Ten minutes and three teeth later he spilled. The key is in the quantum chromodynamics, something about equations running at the sub-atomic level. More gibberish, but I know he was telling the truth. I left him trying to fix his bloody nose and went to meet the Germans. I knew that if anyone had the answer, it was going to be Otto.

I was right. He knew about Janos, so I didn’t have to get nasty again. Too bad. I was thinking about how much I wanted to see Susan in her new stockings. Wasting my time listening to this was making me angry. Otto said that the unaccounted mass came from the energy from the movements and interactions of quarks and gluons. The computations involved envisioning space and time as part of a four-dimensional crystal lattice, with discrete points spaced along columns and rows.

I still didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, but I crossed the street to call the Frenchy. I had his answer. When he picked the phone he was excited like a little girl in her first date at the back of the movie theatre. He wanted to meet right away. Get all the details. I just wanted to get my money and go meet Susan at her place. I told him to meet me at the park, on the corner of Fifth and 64th.

He was there when I arrived, sitting on a bench with a stupid smile in his face. He’d had a lead overdose. Someone got him before I could tell him that Einstein was right. E=mc2 was corroborated for the first time thanks to those computers they stole from the Germans and the Hungarians. I don’t know who killed him. Probably the CIA. Or the KGB. Maybe the Italians. Or all of them. I knew it was time for some silk and alcohol. I took the envelope he still had in his coat and I closed his eyes. There are things that mere mortals don’t need to know. And none of them were Susan’s legs. [AFP]

Both the IBM and Cray systems break the petaflop processing barrier according to Top500 measurements (1.45 petaflops vs 1.38 petaflops, respectively). Heck, even IBM admitted to us that the two computers “run neck and neck.” But there’s a huge difference between them.

The Roadrunner uses roughly half the power of the Jaguar XT.

It assembles 12,960 IBM PowerXCell 8i Cell Broadband Engine processors and an additional 6,948 AMD Opteron Dual-Core processors. The AMD equipment handles “basic” functions while the IBM chips handle the intense number crunching. (Read all about the Roadrunner here.)

Seeing as the Cray XT5 uses 45,000 quad-core AMD Opteron processors to get the same job done, you’ve gotta be at least a little impressed. [Top500]

The system is powered by 45,000 quad-core AMD Opteron processors that take advantage of 362 terabytes of memory. This and other underlaying architecture allows processors to chew on 284 gigabytes of data per second with its impressive I/O bandwidth, which has apparently been a major bottleneck in supercomputers of yesteryear. Information is stored on 750 terabytes of hard drives.

The Cray XT Jaguar can be found at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory where it will create scientific breakthroughs during the day, and succumb to Crysis at night. [ORNL and EurkeAlert]

The network uses fibre optic transmission to send information to 11 primary data centres in Europe, North America and Asia. From these centres, the data is passed to 140 secondary centres globally.

The processing architecture not only distributes the heavy processing load to computers across the world, but it allows 7,000 scientists to share access to LHC data, to sift through the mountains of information for a nugget of valuable data. And when it comes to understanding the fundamental nature of our Universe, we’ll take all the eyes we can get. [China View]