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Category: supercomputing – Page 107

Brain simulation breakthrough reveals clues about sleep, memory

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.

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A quantum logic gate in silicon built for the for the first time (w/video)

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.

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Illustris: The Supercomputer That’s Bringing The Universe To Life

Catalyst: Virtual Universe — The Illustris supercomputer has modelled vast swathes of the universe, allowing us to visualise incredible scenarios in outer space.

Go to the Journeyman Science playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlGSlkijht5iXbPX7d_oTP47c9C3kArQ0

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.

ABC Australia — Ref 6510.

Journeyman Pictures brings you highlights from the cutting-edge science series, ‘Catalyst’, produced by our long-term content partners at ABC Australia. Every day we’ll upload a new episode that takes you to the heart of the most intriguing and relevant science-related stories of the day, transforming your perspective of the issues shaping our world.

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New ‘stealth dark matter’ theory may explain mystery of the universe’s missing mass

A new theory that may explain why dark matter has evaded direct detection in Earth-based experiments has been developed by team of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) particle physicists known as the Lattice Strong Dynamics Collaboration.

The group has combined theoretical and computational physics techniques and used the Laboratory’s massively parallel 2-petaflop Vulcan supercomputer to devise a new model of dark matter. The model identifies today’s dark matter as naturally “stealthy.” But in the extremely high-temperature plasma conditions that pervaded the early universe, it would have been easy to see dark matter via interactions with ordinary matter, the model shows.

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Watson is getting closer and closer to being your doctor

Sure, it can beat Ken Jennings at Jeopardy, tell you about your city, and dream up recipes for delectable delicacies, but now, IBM’s Watson is doing something even more important than all previous capabilities combined — it’s finally getting closer to becoming your doctor. Last April, the century-old company launched IBM Watson Health, and now, it’s opened up a new office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, home to some of the best universities in the U.S., and some of the most impressive biotech and pharmaceutical companies as well. In the last few months, Watson has already expanded its scope to take on some of our most pressing health issues and diseases, including cancer and diabetes, and with this new establishment, it seems that the supercomputer will only be taking on greater responsibilities in the industry.

More exciting still is the announcement that Deborah DiSanzo, the former CEO of Philips Healthcare, will be leading the unit as its general manager. Under her leadership, IBM hopes that Watson Health will be able to grow and further expand its massive cloud computing capabilities, which the company believes holds significant potential for modern health care. While current “health record systems can do great job storing data,” Mike Rhodin, senior vice president of the IBM Watson Group, told Fortune, “Watson can summarize that data and incorporate nurse and doctor’s notes to give a more complete picture.”

Related: IBM is bringing sports into the digital age, starting with the U.S. Open.

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We’re Officially Closer To Creating The World’s Most Powerful Computer

Tech giant, Intel has pledged $50 million (£33 million) to quantum computing research, which could ultimately give us a supercomputer unlike any machine we have known so far.

In an open letter, CEO Brian Krzanich announced a 10-year partnership with Delft University of Technology and TNO, the Dutch Organisation for Applied Research.

Describing the “exciting possibilities” about the research he said: “Quantum computing is one of the more promising areas of long-term research we’ve been exploring in our labs, with some of the smartest engineers in the world.

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Blockchain for IoT? Yes!

Quoted: “Sometimes decentralization makes sense.

Filament is a startup that is taking two of the most overhyped ideas in the tech community—the block chain and the Internet of things—and applying them to the most boring problems the world has ever seen. Gathering data from farms, mines, oil platforms and other remote or highly secure places.

The combination could prove to be a powerful one because monitoring remote assets like oil wells or mining equipment is expensive whether you are using people driving around to manually check gear or trying to use sensitive electronic equipment and a pricey a satellite internet connection.

Instead Filament has built a rugged sensor package that it calls a Tap, and technology network that is the real secret sauce of the operation that allows its sensors to conduct business even when they aren’t actually connected to the internet. The company has attracted an array of investors who have put $5 million into the company, a graduate of the Techstars program. Bullpen Capital led the round with Verizon Ventures, Crosslink Capital, Samsung Ventures, Digital Currency Group, Haystack, Working Lab Capital, Techstars and others participating.

To build its technology, Filament is using a series of protocols that include the blockchain transaction database behind Bitcoin; BitTorrent, the popular peer-to-peer file sharing software; Jose, a contract management protocol that is also used in the OAuth authentication service that lets people use their Facebook ID to log in and manage permissions to other sites around the web;TMesh, a long-range mesh networking technology andTelehash for private messaging.”

“This cluster of technologies is what enables the Taps to perform some pretty compelling stunts, such as send small amounts of data up to 9 miles between Taps and keep a contract inside a sensor for a year or so even if that sensor isn’t connected to the Internet. In practical terms, that might mean that the sensor in a field gathering soil data might share that data with other sensors in nearby fields belonging to other farmers based on permissions the soil sensor has to share that data. Or it could be something a bit more complicated like a robotic seed tilling machine sensing that it was low on seed and ordering up another bag from inventory based on a “contract” it has with the dispensing system inside a shed on the property.

The potential use cases are hugely varied, and the idea of using a decentralized infrastructure is fairly novel. Both IBM and Samsung have tested out using a variation of the blockchain technology for storing data in decentralized networks for connected devices. The idea is that sending all of that data to the cloud and storing it for a decade or so doesn’t always make economic sense, so why not let the transactions and accounting for them happen on the devices themselves?

That’s where the blockchain and these other protocols come in. The blockchain is a great way to store information about a transaction in a distributed manner, and because its built into the devices there’s no infrastructure to support for years on end. When combined with mesh radio technologies such as TMesh it also becomes a good way to build out a network of devices that can communicate with each other even when they don’t have connectivity.”

Read the Article, and watch the Video, here > http://fortune.com/2015/08/18/filament-blockchain-iot/

The Toil Toward Quantum Computers Just Turned Into a Sprint

A new optical chip that can process photons in a dizzying number of infinite ways has been developed by two research teams. Researchers from the University of Bristol in the UK and Nippon Telegraph and Telephone in Japan (NTT) are behind the breakthrough in quantum computing. The means to solve daunting problems such as the ability to design new life-saving drugs; perform advanced calculations that are a step or two beyond even supercomputers; and analyze weather patterns for more accurate forecasting has just received a major boost.

A group of researchers have pulled off a staggering feat; they’ve developed a silicon-based optical chip that is fully reprogrammable and can process photons in every way imaginable and then some, reports Phys.org.

Prof. Jeremy O’Brien, the Director of the Centre for Quantum Photonics at Bristol University where researchers masterminded the development of the chip, said:

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