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Category: supercomputing – Page 84

BMI technology is like anything else; you have an evolution process to finally reach a level of maturity. The good news is that at least at this point of time BMI is at least in that cycle where we are no longer crawling and trying to stand up. We’re in that stage of the cycle where we are standing up and taking a couple of steps at a time. In the next 3 to 5 years, things should be extremely interesting in the BMI space especially as we begin to introduce more sophisticated technology to our connected infrastructure.

Will future soldiers be able to use a direct brain interface to control their hardware?

Imagine if the brain could tell a machine what to do without having to type, speak or use other standard interfaces. That’s the aim of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which has committed US$60 million to a Neural Engineering System Design (NESD) project to do just that.

“Today’s best brain-computer interface systems are like two supercomputers trying to talk to each other using an old 300-baud modem,” said Phillip Alvelda, the NESD program manager. “Imagine what will become possible when we upgrade our tools to really open the channel between the human brain and modern electronics.”

Continue reading “Futures: Interfacing with DARPA’s cyborg soldiers” | >

Great that they didn’t have to use a super computer to do their prescribed, lab controlled experiments. However, to limit QC to a super computer and experimental computations only is a big mistake; I cannot stress this enough. QC is a new digital infrastructure that changes our communications, cyber security, and will eventually (in the years to come) provide consumers/ businesses/ and governments with the performance they will need for AI, Biocomputing, and Singularity.

A group of physicists from the Skobeltsyn Institute of Nuclear Physics, the Lomonosov Moscow State University, has learned to use personal computer for calculations of complex equations of quantum mechanics, usually solved with help of supercomputers. This PC does the job much faster. An article about the results of the work has been published in the journal Computer Physics Communications.

Senior researchers Vladimir Pomerantcev and Olga Rubtsova, working under the guidance of Professor Vladimir Kukulin (SINP MSU) were able to use on an ordinary desktop PC with GPU to solve complicated integral equations of quantum mechanics — previously solved only with the powerful, expensive supercomputers. According to Vladimir Kukulin, personal computer does the job much faster: in 15 minutes it is doing the work requiring normally 2–3 days of the supercomputer time.

The equations in question were formulated in the 60s by the Russian mathematician Ludwig Faddeev. The equations describe the scattering of a few quantum particles, i.e., represent a quantum mechanical analog of the Newtonian theory of the three body systems. As the result, the whole field of quantum mechanics called “physics of few-body systems” appeared soon after this.

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More supercomputer news this week: The US is responding to China’s new Sunway TiahuLight system that was announced Monday, and fast. First, the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory is expected to take delivery of a new IBM system, named Summit, in early 2018 that will now be capable of 200 peak petaflops, Computerworld reports. That would make it almost twice as fast as TaihuLight if the claim proves true. (We had originally reported in 2014 that both Summit and Sierra would achieve roughly 150 petaflops.)

TaihuLight (pictured below) now sits at number one on the twice-yearly TOP500 list of the fastest supercomputers in the world, with a Linpack benchmark score of 93 petaflops and a claimed peak of 124.5 petaflops. The latest TOP500 announcement Monday caused a bit of a stir. Not only is TaihuLight roughly three times faster than China’s Tianhe-2, the prior champion, but it also uses no US-sourced parts at all for the first time, as it’s powered by Sunway 260-core SW26010 processors that are roughly on par with Intel Xeon Phi, as well as custom proprietary interconnect.

sunway-taihulight

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Using numerical modelling, researchers from Russia, the US, and China have discovered previously unknown features of rutile TiO2, which is a promising photocatalyst. The calculations were performed at an MIPT laboratory on the supercomputer Rurik. A paper detailing the results has been published in the journal Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics.

It’s all on the surface

Special substances called catalysts are needed to accelerate or induce certain chemical reactions. Titanium dioxide (TiO2) is a good photocatalyst—when exposed to light, it effectively breaks down water molecules as well as hazardous organic contaminants. TiO2 is naturally found in the form of rutile and other minerals. One of the two most active surfaces of rutile R-TiO2 is a surface that is denoted as (011). The photocatalytic activity is linked to the way in which oxygen and titanium atoms are arranged on the surface. This is why it is important to understand which forms the surface of rutile can take.

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More news on the using the magnetic vortex method to control electron spin.

Researchers at Case Western Reserve University have developed a way to swiftly and precisely control electron spins at room temperature.

The technology, described in Nature Communications, offers a possible alternative strategy for building quantum computers that are far faster and more powerful than today’s supercomputers.

“What makes electronic devices possible is controlling the movement of electrons from place to place using electric fields that are strong, fast and local,” said physics Professor Jesse Berezovsky, leader of the research. “That’s hard with magnetic fields, but they’re what you need to control spin.”

Continue reading “CWRU physicists deploy magnetic vortex to control electron spin” | >

Ubiquitous, mobile supercomputing. Artificially-intelligent robots. Self-driving cars. Neuro-technological brain enhancements. Genetic editing. The evidence of dramatic change is all around us and it’s happening at exponential speed.

Previous industrial revolutions liberated humankind from animal power, made mass production possible and brought digital capabilities to billions of people. This Fourth Industrial Revolution is, however, fundamentally different. It is characterized by a range of new technologies that are fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, impacting all disciplines, economies and industries, and even challenging ideas about what it means to be human.

http://www.weforum.org/

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An Israeli medical imaging company has signed a deal with a Utah-based healthcare provider that could change the way we diagnose certain conditions. Zebra Medical Imaging is teaming up with Intermountain to work on a neural network that will compare fresh X-rays with the “millions” stored in its own database. The eventual aim of the project is to offer up suggestions to radiographers and other medical professionals and eliminate costly misdiagnoses.

For instance, let’s imagine that you’ve gone to hospital for some unknown condition and you get an X-ray. Rather than handing the slide to a doctor, who could miss a small shadow or other minor clue, the image would be handed to the computer. It would use deep learning to trawl an anonymized patient database looking for any anomalies that you might be suffering from. The current system will work on bone health, cardiovascular analysis and lung conditions, although who knows where the possibilities will end.

As deep learning technology gets more powerful, smaller and significantly cheaper, the potential for AI to assist doctors becomes more realistic. IBM has spent the last few years pushing Watson, its homegrown supercomputer, as a system to aid decision making for patients. At the same time, companies like LG are trying to shrink medical imaging technology to end the days of bulky hospital equipment being available for a chosen few. All in all, the idea of a medical tricorder is going from fantastical to plausible in less time than you’d expect.

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Layout of IBM’s five superconducting quantum bit device. In 2015, IBM scientists demonstrated critical breakthroughs to detect quantum errors by combining superconducting qubits in latticed arrangements, and whose quantum circuit design is the only physical architecture that can scale to larger dimensions. Now, IBM scientists have achieved a further advance by combining five qubits in the lattice architecture, which demonstrates a key operation known as a parity measurement — the basis of many quantum error correction protocols. (credit: IBM Research)

IBM Research has announced that effective Wednesday May 4, it is making quantum computing available free to members of the public, who can access and run experiments on IBM’s quantum processor, via the IBM Cloud, from any desktop or mobile device.

IBM believes quantum computing is the future of computing and has the potential to solve certain problems that are impossible to solve on today’s supercomputers.

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QC meets Blockchaining; nice.

CoinFac Limited, a technology company, has recently introduced the next generation quantum computing technology into cryptocurrency mining, allowing current Bitcoin and Altcoin miners to enjoy a 4,000 times speed increase.

Quantum computing is being perceived as the next generation of supercomputers capable of processing dense digital information and generating multi-sequential algorithmic solutions 100,000 times faster than conventional computers. With each quantum computing server costing at an exorbitant price tag of $5 Million — $10 Million, this revolutionary concoction comprising advanced technological servers with a new wave of currency systems, brings about the most uprising event in the cryptocurrency ecosystem.

“We envisioned cryptocurrency to be the game changer in most developed country’s economy within the next 5 years. Reliance of quantum computing technology expedite the whole process, and we will be recognized as the industry leader in bringing about this tidal change. We aren’t the only institution fathom to leverage on this technology. Other Silicon big boys are already in advance talks of a possible tie up”, said Mike Howzer, CEO of CoinFac Limited. “Through the use of quantum computing, usual bitcoin mining processes are expedited by a blazing speed of 4,000 times. We bring lucrative mining back into Bitcoin industry, all over again”.

Continue reading “CoinFac Brings Quantum Computing Technology To Cryptocurrency Mining” | >

Michio Kaku.

The 69-year-old bestselling author, theoretical physicist and futurist takes a longer, more pragmatic view, calling AI an end-of-the-century problem. He adds that even then, if humanity’s come up with no better methods to constrain rogue AI, it’ll be a matter of putting ‘a chip in [artificially intelligent robot] brains to shut them off.’

Artificial intelligence (AI) will end us, save us or—less jazzy-sounding but the more probable intersection of both—eventually obsolete us. From humbling chess grandmaster losses at the hands of mathematically brilliant supercomputers to semantic networks with the linguistic grasp of a four-year-old, one thing seems certain: AI is coming.

Here’s what today’s brightest programmers, philosophers and entrepreneurs have said about our terrifying, astonishing future.

Continue reading “The World’s Smartest People Speak on Artificial Intelligence” | >