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Researchers at Simon Fraser University have made a crucial breakthrough in the development of quantum technology.

Their research, published in Nature today, describes their observations of more than 150,000 silicon “T center” photon-spin qubits, an important milestone that unlocks immediate opportunities to construct massively scalable quantum computers and the quantum internet that will connect them.

Quantum computing has to provide computing power well beyond the capabilities of today’s supercomputers, which could enable advances in many other fields, including chemistry, , medicine and cybersecurity.

The future is now!


Technology continues to move forward at incredible speeds and it seems like every week we learn about a new breakthrough that changes our minds about what is possible.

Researchers in Toronto used a photonic quantum computer chip to solve a sampling problem that went way beyond the fastest computers and algorithms.

The paper the researchers published says that the Borealis quantum chip took only 36 microseconds to solve a problem that would take supercomputers and algorithms 9,000 years to figure out.

Ranjan KC shared a link to the group: Ray Kurzweil.


With the Linpack exaflops milestone achieved by the Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the United States is turning its attention to the next crop of exascale machines, some 5-10x more performant than Frontier. At least one such system is being planned for the 2025–2030 timeline, and the DOE is soliciting input from the vendor community to inform the design and procurement process.


A request for information (RFI) was issued today by the Department of Energy, seeking feedback from computing hardware and software vendors, system integrators, and other entities to assist the DOE National Laboratories in planning for next-gen exascale systems. The RFI says responses will “inform one or more DOE system acquisition RFPs, which will describe requirements for system deliveries in the 2025–2030 timeframe.” This could include the successor to Frontier (aka OLCF-6), the successor to Aurora (aka ALCF-5), the successor to Crossroads (aka ATS-5), the successor to El Capitan (aka ATS-6) as well as a future NERSC system (possibly NERSC-11). Note that of the “predecessor systems,” only Frontier has been installed so far.

Here’s an excerpt from the RFI:

Decades of research has led to a thorough understanding of the main protein players and the broad strokes of membrane fusion for synaptic transmission. Bernard Katz was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in Medicine in part for demonstrating that chemical synaptic transmission consists of a neurotransmitter-filled synaptic vesicle fusing with the plasma membrane at nerve endings and releasing its content into the opposing postsynaptic cell. And Rizo-Rey’s longtime collaborator, Thomas Südhof, won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2013 for his studies of the machinery that mediates neurotransmitter release (many with Rizo-Rey as a co-author).

But Rizo-Rey says his goal is to understand the specific physics of how the activation process of thought occurs in much more detail. “If I can understand that, winning the Nobel Prize would just be a small reward,” he said.

Recently, using the Frontera supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), one of the most powerful systems in the world, Rizo-Rey has been exploring this process, creating a multi-million atom model of the proteins, the membranes, and their environment, and setting them in motion virtually to see what happens, a process known as molecular dynamics.

Scientists in China say they have been able to run an artificial intelligence model as sophisticated as a human brain on their most powerful supercomputer, a report from the South China Morning Pos t reveals.

According to the report, this puts China’s Newest Generation Sunway supercomputer on the same level as the U.S. Department of Energy’s Frontier, which was named the world’s most powerful supercomputer earlier this month.

As a point of reference, Frontier is the first machine to have demonstrated it can perform more than one quintillion calculations per second.

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Unfortunately my internet link went down in the second Q&A session at the end and the recording cut off. Shame, loads of great information came out about FPGA/ASIC implementations, AI for the VR/AR, C/C++ and a whole load of other riveting and most interesting techie stuff. But thankfully the main part of the talk was recorded.

TALK OVERVIEW
This talk is about the realization of the ideas behind the Fractal Brain theory and the unifying theory of life and intelligence discussed in the last Zoom talk, in the form of useful technology. The Startup at the End of Time will be the vehicle for the development and commercialization of a new generation of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) algorithms.

We will show in detail how the theoretical fractal brain/genome ideas lead to a whole new way of doing AI and ML that overcomes most of the central limitations of and problems associated with existing approaches. A compelling feature of this approach is that it is based on how neurons and brains actually work, unlike existing artificial neural networks, which though making sensational headlines are impeded by severe limitations and which are based on an out of date understanding of neurons form about 70 years ago. We hope to convince you that this new approach, really is the path to true AI.

Qubits are a basic building block for quantum computers, but they’re also notoriously fragile—tricky to observe without erasing their information in the process. Now, new research from the University of Colorado Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) could be a leap forward for handling qubits with a light touch.

In the study, a team of physicists demonstrated that it could read out the signals from a type of qubit called a superconducting qubit using , and without destroying the qubit at the same time.

The group’s results could be a major step toward building a , the researchers say. Such a network would link up dozens or even hundreds of quantum chips, allowing engineers to solve problems that are beyond the reach of even the fastest supercomputers around today. They could also, theoretically, use a similar set of tools to send unbreakable codes over long distances.