Lifeboat Foundation

Human Brain as Supercomputer

Brain-emulating computers hold the promise of vastly lower energy computation and better performance on certain tasks. “The human brain is the most advanced supercomputer in the universe, and it consumes only 20 watts to achieve things that artificial intelligence systems today only dream of,” says Hector Gonzalez, cofounder and co-CEO of SpiNNcloud Systems. “We’re basically trying to bridge the gap between brain inspiration and artificial systems.”

Aside from sheer size, a distinguishing feature of the SpiNNaker2 system is its flexibility. Traditionally, most neuromorphic computers emulate the brain’s spiking nature: Neurons fire off electrical spikes to communicate with the neurons around them. The actual mechanism of these spikes in the brain is quite complex, and neuromorphic hardware often implements a specific simplified model. The SpiNNaker2 can implement a broad range of such models however, as they are not hardwired into its architecture.

Ever wonder what happens when you fall into a black hole? Now, thanks to a new, immersive visualization produced on a NASA supercomputer, viewers can plunge into the event horizon, a black hole’s point of no return.

In this visualization of a flight toward a supermassive black hole, labels highlight many of the fascinating features produced by the effects of general relativity along the way. Produced on a NASA supercomputer, the simulation tracks a camera as it approaches, briefly orbits, and then crosses the event horizon — the point of no return — of a monster black hole much like the one at the center of our galaxy. (Video: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/J. Schnittman and B. Powell)

“People often ask about this, and simulating these difficult-to-imagine processes helps me connect the mathematics of relativity to actual consequences in the real universe,” said Jeremy Schnittman, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who created the visualizations. “So I simulated two different scenarios, one where a camera — a stand-in for a daring astronaut — just misses the event horizon and slingshots back out, and one where it crosses the boundary, sealing its fate.”

Supercomputer prediction about the end of the world is pretty much as bad as it sounds.

Buyer is responsible for relocation of 26,000 pounds of equipment.

ARMONK, N.Y., April 30, 2024 — Today, IBM (NYSE: IBM) has announced an agreement with RIKEN, a Japanese national research laboratory, to deploy IBM’s next-generation quantum computer architecture and best-performing quantum processor at the RIKEN Center for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan. It will be the only instance of a quantum computer co-located with the supercomputer Fugaku.

This agreement was executed as part of RIKEN’s existing project, supported by funding from the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO), an organization under Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI)’s “Development of Integrated Utilization Technology for Quantum and Supercomputers” as part of the “Project for Research and Development of Enhanced Infrastructures for Post 5G Information and Communications Systems.” RIKEN has dedicated use of an IBM Quantum System Two architecture for the purpose of implementation of its project. Under the project RIKEN and its co-PI SoftBank Corp., with its collaborators, University of Tokyo, and Osaka University, aim to demonstrate the advantages of such hybrid computational platforms for deployment as services in the future post-5G era, based on the vision of advancing science and business in Japan.

In addition to the project, IBM will work to develop the software stack dedicated to generating and executing integrated quantum-classical workflows in a heterogeneous quantum-HPC hybrid computing environment. These new capabilities will be geared towards delivering improvements in algorithm quality and execution times.

AI that will be able to predict the weather 3,000 times faster than a supercomputer and a program that turns a text prompt into a virtual movie set. These are just two of the applications for AI-powered by Nvidia’s technology.

Jensen Huang leads Nvidia – a tech company with a skyrocketing stock and the most advanced technology for artificial intelligence.

Not many devices in the datacenter have been etched with the Intel 4 process, which is the chip maker’s spin on 7 nanometer extreme ultraviolet immersion lithography. But Intel’s Loihi 2 neuromorphic processor is one of them, and Sandia National Laboratories is firing up a supercomputer with 1,152 of them interlinked to create what Intel is calling the largest neuromorphic system every assembled.

With Nvidia’s top-end “Blackwell” GPU accelerators now pushing up to 1,200 watts in their peak configurations, and require liquid cooling, and other accelerators no doubt following as their sockets get inevitably bigger as Moore’s Law scaling for chip making slows, this is a good time to take a step back and see what can be done with a reasonably scaled neuromorphic system, which not only has circuits which act more like real neurons used in real brains and also burn orders of magnitude less power than the XPUs commonly used in the datacenter for all kinds of compute.

First @NVIDIA DGX H200 in the world, hand-delivered to OpenAI and dedicated by Jensen “to advance AI, computing, and humanity”: v/ @gdb.

First @NVIDIA DGX H200 in the world, hand-delivered to OpenAI and dedicated by Jensen “to advance AI, computing, and humanity”: pic.twitter.com/rEJu7OTNGT

— Greg Brockman (@gdb) April 24, 2024

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The country’s notoriously ancient computer systems are due for an upgrade.