It seems evident that Microsoft is joining other top tech companies in betting on quantum computing with a clear business strategy in mind: to become the market leader in software development platforms for quantum computing. If quantum computers become the next supercomputing revolution in 2025, Microsoft stock will take a quantum leap.
An international team of physicists including theorists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory has published the first calculation of direct “CP” symmetry violation—how the behavior of subatomic particles (in this case, the decay of kaons) differs when matter is swapped out for antimatter. Should the prediction represented by this calculation not match experimental results, it would be conclusive evidence of new, unknown phenomena that lie outside of the Standard Model—physicists’ present understanding of the fundamental particles and the forces between them.
The current result—reported in the November 20 issue of Physical Review Letters —does not yet indicate such a difference between experiment and theory, but scientists expect the precision of the calculation to improve dramatically now that they’ve proven they can tackle the task. With increasing precision, such a difference—and new physics—might still emerge.
“This so called ‘direct’ symmetry violation is a tiny effect, showing up in just a few particle decays in a million,” said Brookhaven physicist Taku Izubuchi, a member of the team performing the calculation. Results from the first, less difficult part of this calculation were reported by the same group in 2012. However, it is only now, with completion of the second part of this calculation—which was hundreds of times more difficult than the first—that a comparison with the measured size of direct CP violation can be made. This final part of the calculation required more than 200 million core processing hours on supercomputers, “and would have required two thousand years using a laptop,” Izubuchi said.
Intel’s new Xeon Phi won’t just power next-generation supercomputers — it’s going to make a debut in workstations as well.
This is the world’s largest nuclear fusion reactor launching this month in Germany. And it was designed by a supercomputer…
The Blue Brain Project is a vast effort by 82 scientists worldwide to digitally recreate the human brain. While still far from that goal, the team revealed a breakthrough that has already provided insight into sleep, memory and neurological disorders. They created a simulation of a third of a cubic millimeter of a rat’s brain. While that might not sound like much, it involves 30,000 neurons and 37 million synapses. In addition, the simulated level of biological accuracy is far beyond anything so far. It allowed them to reproduce known brain activities — such as how neurons respond to touch — and has already yielded discoveries about the brain that were impossible to get biologically.
To create the simulation, researchers did thousands of experiments on rat brains over a 20 year period, logging each type of synapse and neuron discovered. That led to a set of fundamental rules describing how neurons connect to synapses and form microcircuits. Using the data, they developed an algorithm to pinpoint the synapse locations, simulating the circuitry of a rat’s brain. All of that data was then run through a supercomputer: “It was only with this kind of infrastructure that we could solve the billions of equations needed,” said software lead Felix Schurmann.
Blue Brain Project supercomputer recreates part of rodent’s brain with 30,000 neurons connected by 40m synapses to show patterns of behaviour triggered, for example, when whiskers are touched.
A Game Changer in Quantum Computing:
The ingredients for superfast computers could be nearly in place. For the first time, researchers have demonstrated that two silicon transistors acting as quantum bits can perform a tiny calculation.
The advance represents the final physical component needed to realise the promise of super-powerful silicon quantum computers, which harness the science of the very small — the strange behaviour of subatomic particles — to solve computing challenges that are beyond the reach of even today’s fastest supercomputers. Potentially transforming fields like encryption and the search for new pharmaceuticals.
The significant advance, by a team at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney appears today in the international journal Nature (“A two-qubit logic gate in silicon”).
“What we have is a game changer,” said team leader Andrew Dzurak, Scientia Professor and Director of the Australian National Fabrication Facility at UNSW.
“We’ve demonstrated a two-qubit logic gate — the central building block of a quantum computer — and, significantly, done it in silicon. Because we use essentially the same device technology as existing computer chips, we believe it will be much easier to manufacture a full-scale processor chip than for any of the leading designs, which rely on more exotic technologies.
“This makes the building of a quantum computer much more feasible, since it is based on the same manufacturing technology as today’s computer industry,” he added.
Catalyst: Virtual Universe — The Illustris supercomputer has modelled vast swathes of the universe, allowing us to visualise incredible scenarios in outer space.
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Part of what makes astronomy so difficult is the inconceivability of space and its mind-boggling vastness. But an extraordinary new supercomputer called the Illustris has modelled a huge chunk of the universe: a cube 350 million light years across, an area the home to tens of thousands of galaxies. Illustris reveals how galaxies form and collide, shows what happens when unsuspecting matter falls into black holes, and lifts the lid on a host of other dramatic events that have unfolded since the Big Bang. Dr Graham Phillips takes us on a virtual tour of our wondrous universe.
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