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Category: supercomputing

http://www.unz.com/akarlin/sinotriumph/

Nothing illustrates China’s meteoric rise as some well chosen numbers.

By the end of the 1990s, China had come to dominate the mainstays of geopolitical power in the 20th century – coal and steel production. As a consequence, it leapt to the top of the Compositive Index of National Capability, which uses military expenditure, military personnel, energy consumption, iron and steel production, urban population, and total population as a proxy of national power. Still, one could legitimately argue that all of these factors are hardly relevant today. While Germany’s fourfold preponderance in steel production over Russia may have been a critical number in 1914, China’s eightfold advantage in steel production over the US by 2014 is all but meaningless in any relevant comparison of national power. The world has moved on.

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Brain is the most complex biological computing system and performs almost every activity with jet speed and precision. Despite the numerous advancements in the interaction of technology and science, there is no machine that functions as swift as a brain. Nevertheless, the recent experiment by the researchers of Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University in Japan and Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany is a milestone in the history of producing human brain simulations by a computer.

The team of researchers from Japan and Germany have managed to produce the most accurate simulation of a human brain in Japan’s computer. The single second worth of activity in the human brain from just one percent of the complex organ was able to be produced in 40 minutes by the world’s fourth largest computer.

The computer used is the K computer in Japan to simulate human brain activity. The computer has 705,024 processor cores and 1.4 million GB of RAM, but still took 40 minutes to crunch the data for just one second of brain activity. The open-source Neural Simulation Technology (NEST) tool is used to replicate a network consisting of 1.73 billion nerve cells connected by 10.4 trillion synapses.

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This new computer system is 100 billion times more energy efficient than the most energy efficient conventional green supercomputer. Using only links and rotary joints, this “molecular mechanical computer” removes the need for parts that create friction and generate heat.

The trend for computing, and for technology in general, really consists of just one word: Smaller. Previously, technology that could fit on your desk was the rage. Then it became tech that fit in your bag. Then the palm of your hand. Now, scientists are playing with even smaller technology, down to the molecular size.

Scientists have developed a computer system that can, theoretically, be 100 billion times more energy efficient than the most energy efficient conventional green supercomputer. Using only links and rotary joints, this “molecular mechanical computer” removes the need for gears, clutches, switches, springs, and other parts that create friction and generate heat.

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The Elon Musk-backed OpenAI project became Nvidia’s first ever customer to buy a DGX-1 “AI supercomputer in a box.” The system can deliver up to 170 teraflops of performance, which should enable the OpenAI team to significantly improve their AI research.

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https://youtube.com/watch?v=PUlYV–lLAA

In this video, D-Wave Systems Founder Eric Ladizinsky presents: The Coming Quantum Computing Revolution.

“Despite the incredible power of today’s supercomputers, there are many complex computing problems that can’t be addressed by conventional systems. Our need to better understand everything, from the universe to our own DNA, leads us to seek new approaches to answer the most difficult questions. While we are only at the beginning of this journey, quantum computing has the potential to help solve some of the most complex technical, commercial, scientific, and national defense problems that organizations face. We expect that quantum computing will lead to breakthroughs in science, engineering, modeling and simulation, financial analysis, optimization, logistics, and national defense applications.”

Eric Ladizinsky is a senior scientific management executive with a strong background in physics, engineering, materials, manufacturing and team building. Mr. Ladizinsky leads D-Wave’s technical effort to develop the superconducting integrated circuit fabrication process and is often called upon to evangelize on all aspects of quantum computing. At Northrop Grumman Space Technology (formerly TRW, Inc.), he ran a multi-million dollar DARPA program in Quantum Computing using superconducting integrated circuit technology. Mr. Ladizinsky has a BSc. Physics and Mathematics degree from the University of California, Los Angeles and is an Adjunct Professor of Physics at Loyola Marymount University.

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I told folks this; I see another one from Google has joined the QC less than 10 year club. My guess is more likely less than 7 years.

A seminal moment in the quantum technology field just happened: Google’s team of scientists have simulated a hydrogen molecule from its quantum computers, a breakthrough that suggests it could “simulate even larger chemical systems,” writes one of Google Quantum’s engineers, Ryan Rabbush. The search engine’s achievement underscores the technology’s potential as Rabbush posits it can “revolutionize the design of solar cells, industrial catalysts, batteries, flexible electronics, medicines, materials and more.”

As advances in such supercomputers continue, investment and research in this field gathers greater momentum as Google, Alibaba, Baidu, Amazon and other tech giants and governments too are racing to develop this technology. Recently, the European Commission allocated €1 billion to research, incubate and invest in quantum technologies. Meanwhile Google last month made headlines about testing its quantum security to shield its Chrome browser.

“It is a technology that is developing very rapidly,” explains Serguei Beloussov, CEO and founder of data security firm Acronis, adding that industries related to “creativity and human ingenuity” are more difficult to predict and that is the case with this fast-developing field. “Quantum computing at the moment [particularly] quantum metrology and quantum security are things that are dependent on science so [development] can be very slow or rapid. If this technology actually appears, it will be such a huge change that companies like Amazon, Alibaba, Google want to be in front of that change and that is why they are investing,” says this tech expert who is also executive chairman of tech company, Parallels.

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Lookout world Chine Tech is rising and nothing or no one will stop it now. The real question is how soon with the world’s tech valley hub be in China? The US has enjoyed for many decades being the world’s top technology center. However, China for the past 20+ years has been executing their world footprint in owning the title as the top global economic power. In the past we have seen them take over consumer goods manufacturing, pharma (especially generic drugs), and the latest is tech. Wonder what is next?

TOKYO — China has jumped to the front ranks of the supercomputing powers, with its Sunway TaihuLight, powered by domestically developed chips, recently recognized as the fastest computer in the world.

In its debut on the Top500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers in June, the Sunway TaihuLight overwhelmed such rivals as the Tianhe-2, a Chinese supercomputer powered by Intel chips that has claimed the No. 1 spot on the past six Top500 lists. Furthermore, it was the first time for China to surpass the U.S. in the total number of systems on the list.

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Electronic computer technology has moved from valves to transistors to progressively more complex integrated circuits and processor designs, with each change bringing higher levels of performance. Now the advent of quantum computers promises a huge step increase in processor performance to solve certain types of problems.

Quantum computers are much faster than the world’s fastest supercomputers for some applications. In 1994 Peter Shor, an applied mathematician at Bell Laboratories, gave the encryption world a shock when he demonstrated an algorithm showing that quantum computers could threaten conventional prime number based encryption methods.

If an adversary conducts successful espionage raids on encrypted information stored in present technology computer installations, possibly through a compromised or issue-motivated individual who transfers it to portable media, it could become vulnerable to decryption by that rival’s quantum computers.

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Lateral photonic integration of oxide-confined leaky vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers enables their application in data communications and sensing.

Vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) that operate at 850nm and are based on oxide-confined apertures are widely used in optical interconnects in data centers, supercomputers, wireless backbone networks, and consumer applications.1 As the processor productivity in these applications increases, it is necessary to continuously improve performance and scale transmission speeds accordingly. In recent years, developers have produced a generation of devices capable of transmitting 40Gb/s at moderate current densities,2, 3 and they have recently demonstrated 54Gb/s non-return-to-zero transmission through 2.2km of multimode fiber.4 Now, 108Gb/s per wavelength transmission can be realized over 100–300m of multimode fiber through the use of advanced modulation formats: discrete multi-tone,5 multiCAP,6 and PAM4.

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