Ice Cream. Can you taste the technology?

Article first published as Chocolate Ice Cream. Can You Taste the Technology? on Technorati.

There is more tech in those chocolate chips than you can possibly imagine. Talk about kilobyte karma in your Ben and Jerry's Karamel Sutra!

First it was home computers, then cell phones, tablets, flat screen TVs, technology is now completely ingrained, integrated, and inseparable from our everyday lives. Now, technology takes yet another step, designing the actual food that we eat. Ice Cream.

Not just the ingredients, but way down to the molecular level, changing the way it tastes, feels, consistency, and shelf life. This is Einstein Level particle physics at work here.

Dr. Alan Gray, at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, stated "If you zoom in and look at substances and were able to view them at a microscopic level, you would see that there are actually made up from quite complicated structures of different materials."

Jay Gould, at Cray supercomputer, said "...you've got to have a lot of compute power, It's not just a laptop...if you used just a laptop to generate some of these computations, it might take five lifetimes."

Cray super computer published a special document that explains it as "Over the last 12 years, a collaboration between the University of Edinburgh’s Soft Condensed Matter Physics group and the Edinburgh Parallel Computer Centre (EPCC) has developed simulations of soft matter systems using the lattice Boltzmann method and the parallel computing code "Ludwig" to accurately capture the physics of systems such as mixtures, suspensions and liquid crystals. Understanding and controlling the phase separation of liquid mixtures, for example, prevents the formation of those ice cream compromising ice crystals and improves the shelf-life of frozen desserts - one of the many practical applications of the research." The full document can be viewed here. while the Nvidia blog is here.

Initially researchers ran the code on over 200,000 cores on the Cray XT5 Jaguar system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, then switched over to a GPU system that used fewer resources.

Controlling "phase separation" in ice cream can also benefit other complex liquids, such as motor oil, cosmetics, paints, and other foodstuffs.

The next time you lick your favorite flavor, think about the storm of electrons it took swirling around to fabricate the taste, texture, and experience you are enjoying in your mouth.

-J. D. Redmond.