The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing
May 19, 2006
Supercomputer Helps Find Nanoscale Gold Structures
1 | 2 All »
University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) chemistry professor Xiao Cheng Zeng and colleagues reported in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences' online edition that they have found evidence of the first free-standing hollow cage structure composed of clusters of pure metal atoms, which they've dubbed golden hollow cages.
These structures, many of which look somewhat like bird cages, can host an atom inside. Scientists might someday be able to harness these truly tiny cages to carry useful guest atoms for medical or industrial purposes.
"I'm excited by this discovery. These are the first metal hollow cages," Zeng said. "No one expected the cage structure. It was a shocking surprise."
Zeng, Ameritas University Professor of Chemistry, studies clusters of atoms and other materials in the growing field of nanomaterials science, the study of materials at the smallest scale. For perspective, a nanometer is one billionth of a meter or a few millionth the size of a human hair.
"The holy grail of cluster science is studying these clusters from smallest, or infant, to largest, or adult, from cluster to bulk," Zeng said.
Scientists elsewhere had determined that smaller, or infant, gold clusters with fewer than 14 atoms are generally flat, or pancake-shaped, and that clusters with 19 or 20 atoms are considered adults because they share the pyramidal shape of the bulk gold found in jewelry. The structures for the intermediate-, or adolescent-, sized gold clusters containing 15, 16, 17 or 18 atoms were unclear until Zeng's group launched their quantum chemistry search last year.
"We just wanted to fill in the missing information to determine when these structures start looking like adults or the bulk metal," he said. Scientists speculated a gradual evolution in the structures as gold clusters grew larger - from pancake to larger pancakes to pyramids, from 14 to 20 atoms.
"Nobody expected hollow cages in between," he said.
Scientifically, the discovery is exciting, Zeng said, but it also has practical potential. Since the cages are hollow and have room for an atom, they could be used to deliver useful materials. For example, they might ferry a drug in the human blood stream or serve as a diagnostic tool. Such small particles also might be used as catalysts in generating hydrogen fuel or speed other chemical processes
Article Tools
Share Options
(Digg, Technorati, more)
Subscribe
Sponsored Links
Appro Ready-To-Go-Clusters – Quickly deploy ANSYS & Intel Cluster Ready Solutions
Offering a fully integrated Ready-To-Go Cluster based on the Appro GreenBlade System supporting up to 28 blade nodes in a half-size standard rack cabinet, including master nodes and switches.
RSS Feeds
Feeds by Topic
- Applications
- Developer Tools
- Interconnects
- Middleware
- Networks
- Processors
- Storage
- Systems
- Visualization
Feeds by Industry
Feeds by Content Type
Feature Articles
The Week in Review
TACC's Ranger supercomputer celebrates its second year of enabling important research; Microsoft partners with NSF to bring cloud services to researchers; and NSF submits its fiscal year 2011 budget request. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
Read More...
NASA Looks to Move Science Apps Into the Cloud
It seems only natural that the US space agency would be casting its eyes toward the clouds. Sure enough, NASA is now looking to cloud computing to optimize the operation of the agency's IT infrastructure for some of its science codes. Like many commercial businesses and government organizations, NASA is being asked to do more computing with fewer datacenter resources.
Read More...
Thoughts, Observations, Beliefs & Opinions About the NSF Supercomputer Centers
There is no such thing as an NSF (Supercomputer) Center and there never has been. There should be. What there are, in the words of Ed Hayes, then comptroller of NSF, are "NSF ASSISTED Supercomputer Centers." This is a double edged sword.
Read More...
Top Headlines
IBM Releases Energy Efficient Power7 System
Feb 09 | eWeek Europe | Company says new high-end servers will deliver "intelligent performance." Read more...
Inductive Coupling Packs Flash Drive in a Chip
Feb 09 | EE Times | Wireless technology promises energy-efficient chip-to-chip communication. Read more...
IBM, Microsoft Help Create Montana Supercomputer
Feb 08 | eWeek | A new kind of Rocky Mountain high. Read more...
AMD Aims for GPUs in Mainstream Servers Starting 2012
Feb 08 | Computerworld | Chip maker hopes to bring CPU-GPU processors to servers in two years. Read more...
Graphene Transistors That Work at Blistering Speeds
Feb 05 | Technology Review | IBM has created graphene transistors that leave silicon ones in the dust. Read more...
Featured Whitepapers
Virtualization for Aggregation And The vSMP Architecture™
Jan 12 | | In-depth look at vSMP Foundation server virtualization technology, technical implementation, use cases and capabilities. The technical whitepaper provides an architectural overview and details on the three vSMP Foundation products: vSMP Foundation for SMP, vSMP Foundation for Cluster and vSMP Foundation for Cloud.
Copper Cable Technologies for High Performance Computing
Jan 18 | | This white paper discusses Gore’s copper cable assemblies, and how they continue to exceed the standards for providing reliable, cost-effective solutions for high-performance computer applications.
Appro Assists LLNL with Cluster Designed for Extreme Scale Visualization
Jan 11 | | LLNL is home to some of the fastest computers in the world. In 2012, LLNL expects to have the Sequoia supercomputing cluster operational with a projected performance of over 20 PFLOP/s. These systems will focus on strengthening the foundations of predictive simulation through running large suites of complex simulations and then comparing model predictions with experimental data. To visualize this project’s large amount of data, LLNL requested an Appro Supercomputing Cluster specifically designed to support interactive data analysis.
Multimedia
Webcast: Virtualized Data Center Roundtable
Join this online panel discussion for live Q&A with leading industry experts, analysts, and end-users to discuss the latest innovations, best practices, barriers to implementation, and measurable benefits of server virtualization with a particular focus on today's real world solutions.
Webcast: Watch SC09 Birds of a Feather Video: Scalable Fault-Tolerant HPC Supercomputers
Learn about scalable fault-tolerant architectures and examples of energy efficient and scalable supercomputing clusters using dual QDR InfiniBand to combine capacity computing with network failover capabilities with the help of programming languages such as MPI and a robust Linux cluster management package.
Webcast: High Performance Computing for a Smarter Planet
LIVE@SCO9: The IBM team discusses new innovations in hardware, software and services that help clients better understand their workloads and get insight from their R&D efforts. Technology demonstrations include the soon-to-be-released Power7 HPC processor, the DCS990 system with 2.4 petabytes of storage, the xCAT management tool, secure HPC cloud computing and more. Winners of two HPCwire Readers' and Editors’ Choice Awards! Take the IBM virtual tour at SC09 or more information go online to: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/sc09.html
Newsletters
Stay informed! Subscribe to HPCwire email Newsletters.
HPC Job Bank
-
Director Research Computing
Weill Cornell Medical College -
Senior Scientist I - HPC Applications Researcher
National Renewable Energy Laboratory -
Lead .NET Engineer - WCF
Risk Management Solutions -
Senior Scientist I - HPC Parallel Programming and Performance
National Renewable Energy Laboratory -
Sr. Computational Scientist
Argonne National Laboratory -
Product Manager
Microsoft -
Senior Project Manager
NCSA - Visit the HPCwire Job Bank
Featured Events
-
January 21, 2010
Virtualized Data Center Roundtable
Webcast
-
March 16-18, 2010
24th Annual HPCC Conference, Supercomputing: Are We There Yet?
Newport , RI
USA
-
April 13-14, 2010
HPC User Forum
Dearborn , MI
USA
-
April 19-23, 2010
Cloud Slam Events --Producer of Cloud Slam '10
Online Event
-
April 19-21, 2010
Cloud Computing Conference & Expo 2010 East
NY , NY
USA
-
May 10-12, 2010
DEISA PRACE Symposium 2010
Barcelona Spain