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A tangle of talents untangles neurons

By Guest PostJune 10, 2013Sciencebiological phenomenon, brain science, brown university, cell cultures, cristina lopez fagundo, diane hoffman kim, jennifer mitchel, microfabrication facility, mike cohea, nerve cells, neurons, puerto rico, rat neural tissue, schwann cells, semiconductor, substrates, talisha ramchal, tangle of talents, techniques, technological ingenuity, topography, university, yu ting dingle

Brown’s growing programs in brain science and engineering come together in the lab of Diane Hoffman-Kim. In a recent paper, her group employed techniques ranging from semiconductor-style circuit patterning to rat cell culture to optimize the growth of nerve cells for applications such as reconstructive surgery.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Two wrongs don’t make a right, they say, but here’s how one tangle can straighten out another.

Diane Hoffman-Kim, associate professor of medicine in the Department of Molecular Pharmacology, Physiology, and Biotechnology, is an affiliate of both Brown’s Center for Biomedical Engineering and the Brown Institute for Brain Science. Every thread of expertise woven through those multidisciplinary titles mattered in the Hoffman-Kim lab’s most recent paper, led by graduate student Cristina Lopez-Fagundo. (more…)

Transactional Memory: An Idea Ahead of Its Time

By Guest PostApril 10, 2012Science, Technologyamherst, ars technica, blue gene, brown university, buzz, computer, computer scientist, computing technology, core processor, eliot moss, hardware architecture, hardware computing, haswell, ibm, maurice herlihy, mike cohea, parallel processor, q supercomputer, richard lewis, transactional memory, university of massachusetts

Nearly 20 years ago, two Brown University computer scientists were working on a largely theoretical problem: How could multiple parallel processors make changes to shared resources safely and efficiently? Their proposal — transactional memory — is sparking fresh interest as a new generation of processors seeks improved power and speed.

In 1993, Maurice Herlihy and a colleague published a paper on transactional memory — a new, clever tactic in computing to deal with handling shared revisions to information seamlessly and concurrently. Few noticed.

Nearly 20 years later, transactional memory is an idea that’s now the rage in hardware computing, and Herlihy, computer science professor at Brown University, has morphed into a prophet of sorts, a computing pioneer who was far ahead of his time. Intel recently announced that transactional memory will be included in its mainstream “Haswell” hardware architecture by next year. IBM has adopted transactional memory in the Blue Gene/Q supercomputer. The original paper by Herlihy and Eliot Moss has been cited more than 1,300 times. (more…)

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A tangle of talents untangles neurons

Transactional Memory: An Idea Ahead of Its Time