Oak Ridge National Laboratory research has aided in development of two new lines of wireless sensor products targeted at manufacturers by industry heavyweights Honeywell and General Electric. The instrument offeringsRF ValProbe by GE and OneWireless by Honeywellrepresent a new generation of wireless technology that taps industry-standard approaches to radio frequency identification, or RFID, and wireless sensors for advanced monitoring of manufacturing equipment to more accurately determine maintenance needs for the systems and anticipate equipment failures. Such capability improves manufacturing process efficiency, reduces emissions and prevents costly outages for equipment repairs. Funding for the projects came from the Department of Energys Industrial Technology Program and private dollars from each of the companies. [Contact: Larisa Brass, (865) 574-4163; brasslm@ornl.gov]

Supercomputing-like performance could be available for countless scientific applications through an approach that exploits the power of reconfigurable computing using field-programmable gate array. In a recent demonstration, Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers tripled the speed of a popular biomolecular simulation package using standard programming languages on a system offered by SRC Computers. While field-programmable gate arrays, which are a different type of logic chip than traditional microprocessors, are traditionally used for other purposes -- such as signal processing -- the team of ORNL and SRC Computers researchers has bridged the gap to exploit their incredible capabilities for improved performance on scientific applications. This possibility could deliver performance of supercomputing devices to institutional clusters and desktop users while balancing their needs for scientific productivity, said Sadaf Alam
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Contact: Ron Walli
wallira@ornl.gov
865-576-0226
DOE/Oak Ridge National Laboratory
6-Aug-2007