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Category: supercomputing

Someday, we might be able to carry around tiny, AI brains that can function without supercomputers, the internet or the cloud. Researchers from MIT say their new “brain-on-a-chip” design gets us one step closer to that future. A group of engineers put tens of thousands of artificial brain synapses, known as memristors, on a single chip that’s smaller than a piece of confetti.

In a paper published in Nature Nanotechnology, the researchers explain how their brain-inspired chip was able to remember and recreate a gray-scale image of Captain America’s shield and reliably alter an image of MIT’s Killian Court by sharpening and blurring it. Those tests may seem minor, but the team believes the chip design could advance the development of small, portable AI devices and carry out complex computational tasks that today only supercomputers are capable of.

“So far, artificial synapse networks exist as software. We’re trying to build real neural network hardware for portable artificial intelligence systems,” says Jeehwan Kim, associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. “Imagine connecting a neuromorphic device to a camera on your car, and having it recognize lights and objects and make a decision immediately, without having to connect to the internet.”

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Physicists around the world are cracking open the proton, within the nucleus of the atom, to see what’s inside.

The proton is a fundamental building block of the atomic nucleus, and among other things it’s used as a medical probe in magnetic resonance imaging. It also has a rich inner structure made up of subatomic particles called quarks and gluons, which bind the quarks together.

Scientists are running a unique experiment involving the world’s largest particle physics laboratory and the world’s fastest university supercomputer to see and understand the dynamic world inside the proton.

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MOSCOW, Janaury 28. /TASS/. The quantum computer currently in development by Russian scientists will achieve the so-called “quantum supremacy,” or the ability to perform operations, practically impossible for the existing conventional supercomputers, in two years, says Sergei Kulik, the head of Quantum Technologies Center of the Moscow State University Faculty of Physics.

“There is a Perspective Research Fund project called ‘Priboy.’ According to the project’s goals, we must create a quantum simulator and achieve quantum supremacy in two years — i.e. show a calculation that is impossible for a classical computer,” Kulik said.

Currently, the laboratory has two physical platforms for building a quantum computer — the one based on neutral atoms and the other based on photon chips.

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Quantum computers theoretically can prove more powerful than any supercomputer, and now scientists calculate just what quantum computers need to attain such “quantum supremacy,” and whether or not Google achieved it with its claims last year.

Whereas classical computers switch transistors either on or off to symbolize data as ones or zeroes, quantum computers use quantum bits—qubits—that, because of the bizarre nature of quantum physics, can be in a state of superposition where they are both 1 and 0 simultaneously.

Superposition lets one qubit perform two calculations at once, and if two qubits are linked through a quantum effect known as entanglement, they can help perform 22 or four calculations simultaneously; three qubits, 23 or eight calculations; and so on. In principle, a quantum computer with 300 qubits could perform more calculations in an instant than there are atoms in the visible universe.

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Microsoft announced Tuesday that it has built the fifth most powerful computer on Earth.

Packed with 285,000 and 10,000 GPUs, the was built in collaboration with San Francisco-based artificial intelligence research organization OpenAI. Microsoft announced its partnership with OpenAI last year and contributed $1 billion to the project.

The will operate as part of Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing system. The technology giant expects to achieve significantly better results from a single massive supercomputer system than from large numbers of smaller, isolated models.

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Several supercomputers in Europe have been hacked in the past few days. Attackers are thought to use these supercomputers for mining Monero (XMR).

A massive attack was carried out on some supercomputers based in Germany, the UK and Switzerland. These events first surfaced with the announcement of the University of Edinburgh on Monday. University of Edinburgh; He explained that the supercomputer known as ARCHER has detected a “vulnerability in the input nodes” and the system has been disabled. Authorities had to reset their SSH password to prevent the attack.

The attacks were not limited to this. An organization called bwHPC in Germany also made a statement on Monday, and five different supercomputers in Germany; It announced that it was closed due to “vulnerabilities” similar to those in the UK.

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With the help of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, Juliette Stecenko is exploring cosmology—a branch of astronomy that investigates the origin and evolution of the universe, from the Big Bang to today and into the future. As an intern through DOE’s Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internships (SULI) program, administered at Brookhaven by the Office of Educational Programs (OEP), Stecenko is using modern supercomputers and quantum computing platforms to perform astronomy simulations that may help us better understand where we came from.

Stecenko works under the guidance of Michael McGuigan, a computational scientist in the quantum computing group at Brookhaven’s Computational Science Initiative. The two have been collaborating on simulating Casimir energy—a small force that two electrically neutral surfaces held a tiny distance apart will experience from quantum, atomic, or subatomic fluctuations in the vacuum of space. The vacuum energy of the universe and the Casimir pressure of this energy could be a possible explanation of the origin and evolution of the universe, as well a possible cause of its accelerated expansion.

“Casimir energy is something scientists can measure in the laboratory and is especially important for nanoscience, or in cosmology, in the very early universe when the universe was very small,” McGuigan said.

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Drugs used for curing hepatitis C might also help against Covid-19 / World Health Organization publishes paper presented by researchers from Mainz University.

Several drugs approved for treating hepatitis C viral infection were identified as potential candidates against COVID-19, the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. This is the result of research based on extensive calculations using the MOGON II supercomputer at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU). One of the most powerful computers in the world, MOGON II is operated by JGU and the Helmholtz Institute Mainz.

As the JGU researchers explained in their paper recently published at the World Health Organization (WHO) website, they had simulated the way that about 42,000 different substances listed in open databases bind to certain proteins of SARS-CoV-2 and thereby inhibit the penetration of the virus into the human body or its multiplication.

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Two decades ago, an experiment at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory pinpointed a mysterious mismatch between established particle physics theory and actual lab measurements. When researchers gauged the behavior of a subatomic particle called the muon, the results did not agree with theoretical calculations, posing a potential challenge to the Standard Model—our current understanding of how the universe works.

Ever since then, scientists around the world have been trying to verify this discrepancy and determine its significance. The answer could either uphold the Standard Model, which defines all of the known subatomic particles and how they interact, or introduce the possibility of an entirely undiscovered physics. A multi-institutional research team (including Brookhaven, Columbia University, and the universities of Connecticut, Nagoya and Regensburg, RIKEN) have used Argonne National Laboratory’s Mira supercomputer to help narrow down the possible explanations for the discrepancy, delivering a newly precise theoretical calculation that refines one piece of this very complex puzzle. The work, funded in part by the DOE’s Office of Science through its Office of High Energy Physics and Advanced Scientific Computing Research programs, has been published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

A muon is a heavier version of the electron and has the same electric charge. The measurement in question is of the muon’s magnetic moment, which defines how the particle wobbles when it interacts with an external magnetic field. The earlier Brookhaven experiment, known as Muon g-2, examined muons as they interacted with an electromagnet storage ring 50 feet in diameter. The experimental results diverged from the value predicted by theory by an extremely small amount measured in parts per million, but in the realm of the Standard Model, such a difference is big enough to be notable.

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