Cisco to launch 120Gbps router?

Cisco may come up with a new carrier core router to outpace Juniper's T1600. But it is rumoured that issues with the supporting application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) design may delay the Cisco's telco router rollout by up to a year, reports The Register.

The new MSC120 Cisco router will become heir to Carrier Router System (CRS-1) introduced in 2004, according to a bulletin issued from Oppenheimer analyst Ittai Kidron. It will sport speeds of 120Gb/s per slot, and it's intended to one-up Juniper's 100Gb/s router interface card for the T1600 Core Router.

He reckons that the MSC120 will support 12 to 24 slots with a total throughput exceeding 2Tb/s. Juniper claims the T1600, in conjunction with its JCS1200 control system, provides transport scale up to 25 Tb/s.

The analyst claims that Cisco's plans are to announce the MSC120 over the next month, but he says the company recently uncovered design faults with its three-chipset ASIC switching fabric architecture that threaten to delay those plans. "We believe Cisco has recently discovered issues with the supporting ASIC design, which could require a material redesign of the platform," Kidron said. "This could delay product availability until mid-2011."

Soon, Gmail to allow status updates like Twitter

The rising popularity of status updates on Twitter and Facebook seems to have inspired Google. Google will soon allow users to share their status with other connections, just like on all popular Social Networking sites. Even though the news is not official, but the add-on is expected to be added as soon as this week, according to electronista.

The service will be similar to what Yahoo has done with its Yahoo Mail service in 2009, which, for example, alerted users when their friends have uploaded photos to Flickr.

An unnamed informant says the new Google revisions will also allow users to share their YouTube and Picasa content.

Gmail already lets contacts chat in the browser, set away messages and write short messages as their status.

Indian startup to help copy your brain on computers

Now, Swiss scientists and PIT Solution, a little-heard of IT startup in Technopark in Kerala will be working on the Blue Brain Project, the world's first comprehensive attempt to reverse-engineer the mammalian brain, reports Financial Express.

The $3 billion project is expected to be completed by 2018, said Brain Mind Institute of Swiss Federal Institute Director Henry Markram to Financial Express. The project is billed as an attempt to build a computerized copy of a brain - starting with a rat's brain, and then progressing to a human brain-inside one of the world's most powerful computers. It is an international project, propelled by Swiss Federal Institute, and involves several countries
and ethics monitoring by UN bodies. India is yet to be part of the project.


The immediate purpose is to understand brain function and dysfunction through detailed simulations. "The study of rhodent brain has given us a template to build on. This would help in unraveling human brain," says Markram. "The whole idea is that mental illness, memory and perception triggered by neurons and electric signals could be soon treated with a supercomputer that models all the 1,000,000 million synapses of brain."

The key finding is that irrespective of gender and race, human brains are basically identical. "We will be able to map the differentiations by nuancing the patterns later. The exciting part is not how different we are but how similar we all are," says Markram.