IBM plans to move into a more modular design for future quantum computers to allow for more flexibility and rapid scale-up of qubits.
Category: supercomputing – Page 49
Examining the optimal working conditions for the brain as a model for new computers
With mathematical modeling, a research team has now succeeded in better understanding how the optimal working state of the human brain, called criticality, is achieved. Their results mean an important step toward biologically-inspired information processing and new, highly efficient computer technologies and have been published in Scientific Reports.
“In particular tasks, supercomputers are better than humans, for example in the field of artificial intelligence. But they can’t manage the variety of tasks in everyday life —driving a car first, then making music and telling a story at a get-together in the evening,” explains Hermann Kohlstedt, professor of nanoelectronics. Moreover, today’s computers and smartphones still consume an enormous amount of energy.
“These are no sustainable technologies—while our brain consumes just 25 watts in everyday life,” Kohlstedt continues. The aim of their interdisciplinary research network, “Neurotronics: Bio-inspired Information Pathways,” is therefore to develop new electronic components for more energy-efficient computer architectures. For this purpose, the alliance of engineering, life and natural sciences investigates how the human brain is working and how that has developed.
Digital Doubles and Second Selves
This time I come to talk about a new concept in this Age of Artificial Intelligence and the already insipid world of Social Networks. Initially, quite a few years ago, I named it “Counterpart” (long before the TV series “Counterpart” and “Black Mirror”, or even the movie “Transcendence”).
It was the essence of the ETER9 Project that was taking shape in my head.
Over the years and also with the evolution of technologies — and of the human being himself —, the concept “Counterpart” has been getting better and, with each passing day, it makes more sense!
Imagine a purely digital receptacle with the basics inside, like that Intermediate Software (BIOS(1)) that computers have between the Hardware and the Operating System. That receptacle waits for you. One way or another, it waits patiently for you, as if waiting for a Soul to come alive in the ether of digital existence.
Existential Hope: Creon Levit | On space and the long-term future
Are we alone in the universe? What could a future for humans in space look like? And what would Creon’s advise to Elon Musk be if he wants to make a self-sufficient mass colony there? This Hope Drop features Creon Levit, chief technologist and director of R&D at Planet Labs.
Creon Levit is chief technologist at Planet Labs, where he works to move the world toward existential hope via novel satellite technologies. He also hosts Foresight Institute’s Space Group.
Creon speaks on:
- His experiences working with NASA & Planet Labs.
- Natural systems technologies.
- Regenerative Agriculture.
- His vision for the future.
- And much more!
Creon is chief technologist and director of R&D at Planet Labs, and a Foresight Institute senior fellow. He previously worked at NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, where he was one of the founders of the NAS (NASA Advanced Supercomputing) division, co-PI on the Virtual Wind Tunnel project, co-founder of the NASA Molecular Nanotechnology Group (the first federally funded research lab devoted to molecular nanotechnology), co-PI on the hyperwall project, investigator on the Columbia accident investigation board, member of the NASA engineering and safety center, investigator on the millimeter-wave thermal rocket project, the Stardust re-entry observation campaign, PI on the LightForce project, special assistant to the center director, and chief scientist for the programs and projects directorate.
Submit your contribution to the storytelling bounty from Creon’s prompt to “Imagine a shift in human nature where we could all have love, community, technology, and adventure, as well as lack of severe hardship or fear.” here: https://680d4kcs6ki.typeform.com/to/jHROTs6z.
Elon Musk Reveals Secret DOJO Computer at Tesla Ai Day
Elon Musk Reveals Secret DOJO Computer at Tesla AI Day.
#teslanews #teslaai #elonmusk.
During AI Day, the Tesla CEO was the first person to confirm the existence of the ‘Dojo’ program: “We do have a major program at Tesla which we don’t have enough time to talk about today called ” Dojo”. That’s a super powerful training computer. The goal of Dojo will be to be able to take in vast amounts of data and train at a video level and do massive unsupervised training of vast amounts of video with the Dojo program – or Dojo computer.”
In June 2020, Elon Musk tweeted, “Dojo, our training supercomputer, will be able to process vast amounts of video training data & efficiently run hyperspace arrays with an enormous number of parameters, plenty of memory & ultra-high bandwidth between cores.
Neuroscientist leads unprecedented research to map billions of brain cells
Circa 2018 face_with_colon_three
Since the time of Hippocrates and Herophilus, scientists have placed the location of the mind, emotions and intelligence in the brain. For centuries, this theory was explored through anatomical dissection, as the early neuroscientists named and proposed functions for the various sections of this unusual organ. It wasn’t until the late 19th century that Camillo Golgi and Santiago Ramón y Cajal developed the methods to look deeper into the brain, using a silver stain to detect the long, stringy cells now known as neurons and their connections, called synapses.
Today, neuroanatomy involves the most powerful microscopes and computers on the planet. Viewing synapses, which are only nanometers in length, requires an electron microscope imaging a slice of brain thousands of times thinner than a sheet of paper. To map an entire human brain would require 300,000 of these images, and even reconstructing a small three-dimensional brain region from these snapshots requires roughly the same supercomputing power it takes to run an astronomy simulation of the universe.
Fortunately, both of these resources exist at Argonne, where, in 2015, Kasthuri was the first neuroscientist ever hired by the U.S. Department of Energy laboratory. Peter Littlewood, the former director of Argonne who brought him in, recognized that connectome research was going to be one of the great big data challenges of the coming decades, one that UChicago and Argonne were perfectly poised to tackle.
A 1973 MIT Supercomputer Predicted the End of the World by 2040
However, in 1973, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology predicted the end of our civilization with the help of one of the most powerful supercomputers of that time.
In 1973, experts developed a computer program at MIT to model global sustainability. Instead, it predicted that by 2040 our civilization would end.
Recently, that prediction re-appeared in Australian Media, making its way to the rest of the world.
