Tag Archives: supercomputer

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and IBM Collaborate to Build Brain-Inspired Supercomputer

Chip-architecture breakthrough accelerates path to exascale computing; Helps computers tackle complex, cognitive tasks such as pattern recognition and sensory processing

LIVERMORE, Calif. and ARMONK, N.Y. – 29 Mar 2016: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) today announced it has purchased a first-of-a-kind brain-inspired supercomputing platform for deep learning inference developed by IBM Research. Based on a breakthrough neurosynaptic computer chip called IBM TrueNorth, the scalable platform will process the equivalent of 16 million neurons and 4 billion synapses and consume the energy equivalent of a tablet computer – a mere 2.5 watts of power for the 16 TrueNorth chips. The brain-like, neural network design of the IBM Neuromorphic System is able to infer complex cognitive tasks such as pattern recognition and integrated sensory processing far more efficiently than conventional chips. (more…)

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On the Road to Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computing

Collaboration at Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source Induces High Temperature Superconductivity in a Toplogical Insulator

Reliable quantum computing would make it possible to solve certain types of extremely complex technological problems millions of times faster than today’s most powerful supercomputers. Other types of problems that quantum computing could tackle would not even be feasible with today’s fastest machines. The key word is “reliable.” If the enormous potential of quantum computing is to be fully realized, scientists must learn to create “fault-tolerant” quantum computers. A small but important step toward this goal has been achieved by an international collaboration of researchers from China’s  Tsinghua University and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) working at the Advanced Light Source (ALS). (more…)

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Supercomputer Helps Planck Mission Expose Ancient Light

Like archeologists carefully digging for fossils, scientists with the Planck mission are sifting through cosmic clutter to find the most ancient light in the universe.

The Planck space telescope has created the most precise sky map ever made of the oldest light known, harking back to the dawn of time. This light, called the cosmic microwave background, has traveled 13.8 billion years to reach us. It is so faint that Planck observes every point on the sky an average of 1,000 times to pick up its glow. (more…)

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Blowing Up Stars

*For his discoveries about the lives and deaths of stars, the exotic physics of black holes and the origin of chemical elements, UA Regents’ Professor David Arnett has been honored with the Henry Norris Russell Lectureship.*

What happens when a star dies? How does a black hole form? What makes the chemical elements that form the building blocks of stars, planets and living beings?

Those are the kinds of questions that have fascinated David Arnett, a Regents’ Professor at the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory, from an early age. (more…)

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Pair of Black Holes ‘Weigh In’ At 10 Billion Suns, The Most Massive Yet

AUSTIN, Texas — A team of astronomers including Karl Gebhardt and graduate student Jeremy Murphy of The University of Texas at Austin have discovered the most massive black holes to date — two monsters weighing as much as 10 billion suns and threatening to consume anything, even light, within a region five times the size of our solar system.

The research is published in the Dec. 8 issue of the journal Nature in a paper headlined by  graduate student Nicholas McConnell and professor Chung-Pei Ma of the University of California, Berkeley. (more…)

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Teraflop Troubles: The Power of Graphics Processing Units May Threaten the World’s Password Security System

It’s been called revolutionary – technology that lends supercomputer-level power to any desktop. What’s more, this new capability comes in the form of a readily available piece of hardware, a graphics processing unit (GPU) costing only a few hundred dollars.

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