Lifeboat Foundation

Canadian quantum computer company, Xanadu, has used its photonic quantum computer chip, Borealis, to solve a problem in 36 microseconds versus classical supercomputers taking 9,000 years. This is 7,884 trillion times faster. This runtime advantage is more than 50 million times larger than that of earlier photonic demonstrations.

An earlier quantum photonic computer used a static chip. The Borealis optical elements can all be readily programmed.

Continue reading “Xanadu Photonic Quantum Chip Solves Trillions of Times Faster” »

The first exascale computer has officially arrived.

The world’s fastest supercomputer performed more than a quintillion calculations per second, entering the realm of exascale computing. That’s according to a ranking of the world’s speediest supercomputers called the TOP500, announced on May 30. The computer, known as Frontier, is the first exascale computer to be included on the biannual list.

Ars Technica’s Chris Lee has spent a good portion of his adult life playing with lasers, so he’s a big fan of photon-based quantum computing. Even as various forms of physical hardware like superconducting wires and trapped ions made progress, it was possible to find him gushing about an optical quantum computer put together by a Canadian startup called Xanadu. But, in the year since Xanadu described its hardware, companies using that other technology continued to make progress by cutting down error rates, exploring new technologies, and upping the qubit count.

But the advantage of optical quantum computing didn’t go away, and now Xanadu is back with a reminder that it still hasn’t gone away. Thanks to some tweaks to the design it described a year ago, Xanadu is now able to sometimes perform operations with more than 200 qubits. And it has shown that simulating the behavior of just one of those operations on a supercomputer would take 9,000 years, while its optical quantum computer can do them in just a few-dozen milliseconds.

This is an entirely contrived benchmark: Just as Google’s quantum computer did, the quantum computer is just being itself while the supercomputer is trying to simulate it. The news here is more about the potential of Xanadu’s hardware to scale.

The king is dead, long live the king… of supercomputers!

In this video I discuss New Fastest Supercomputer in the World and the first official Exascale supercomputer — Frontier Supercomputer located at Oak Ridge Lab.

Continue reading “New World’s Fastest Supercomputer Explained” »

The world’s first exascale computer, capable of performing a billion billion operations per second, has been built by Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in the US.

A typical laptop is only capable of a few teraflops, or a trillion operations per second, which is a million times less. The exaflop machine, called Frontier, could help solve a range of complex scientific problems, such as accurate climate modelling, nuclear fusion simulation and drug discovery.

“Frontier will offer modelling and simulation capabilities at the highest level of computing performance,” says Thomas Zacharia at ORNL.

The AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has bagged the top spot on the Top500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers. The Top500 list also said that the Frontier system is the first true exascale machine with an HPL score of 1.102 Exaflop/s. For two years, the top spot was occupied by the Fugaku system at the RIKEN Center for Computational Science (R-CCS) in Kobe, Japan.

Based on the latest HPE Cray EX235a architecture and equipped with AMD EPYC 64C 2GHz processors, the system has 8,730,112 total cores and a power efficiency rating of 52.23 gigaflops/watt. It relies on gigabit ethernet for data transfer.

AMD-powered systems now comprise five of the top ten fastest supercomputers.

The AMD EPYC-powered Frontier supercomputer is the first exascale system in the world, taking the top spot with mind-bending stats.