Lifeboat Foundation

A model system created by stacking a pair of monolayer semiconductors is giving physicists a simpler way to study confounding quantum behavior, from heavy fermions to exotic quantum phase transitions.

The group’s paper, “Gate-Tunable Heavy Fermions in a Moiré Kondo Lattice,” published March 15 in Nature. The lead author is postdoctoral fellow Wenjin Zhao in the Kavli Institute at Cornell.

The project was led by Kin Fai Mak, professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences, and Jie Shan, professor of applied and engineering physics in Cornell Engineering and in A&S, the paper’s co-senior authors. Both researchers are members of the Kavli Institute; they came to Cornell through the provost’s Nanoscale Science and Microsystems Engineering (NEXT Nano) initiative.

For individuals suffering from drug addiction, certain cues—whether it’s specific people, places or things—can trigger powerful cravings for repeated use.

A new University of Michigan study has identified brain signals, traditionally associated with inflammation, contributing to people’s vulnerability to addiction. With repeated drug use with the same exposure to cues, some individuals develop an inability to control their drug use, even in the face of negative consequences.

The study is published in the journal eNeuro.

A team of geochemists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, working with colleagues from the University of Hong Kong, Tianjin University and the University of California, has found evidence that suggests much of the oxygen in early Earth’s early atmosphere may have come from rocks. In their study, reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group conducted lab experiments involving crushing rocks, exposing the results to water and measuring reactive oxygen species that were emitted.

Prior research has shown that Earth experienced what has been called the Great Oxidation Event approximately 2.3 to 2.4 billion years ago. During this time, microbe numbers increased dramatically, as they released oxygen during photosynthesis. But prior research has also suggested that a common life ancestor existed before the Great Oxidation Event, which further suggests that there was some amount of oxygen exposure. In this new effort, the researchers suggest that such oxygen could have come from rocks interacting with water.

The work involved crushing samples of quartz and then exposing them to water, which replicates some of the conditions that existed on early Earth prior to the rise of high levels of oxygen in the atmosphere. Adding water to freshly crushed quartz, the researchers found, led to reactions between the water and newly broken crystals. This resulted it the formation of molecular oxygen along with other reactive oxygen species like hydrogen peroxide. Such species are also known as free radicals and they would have played an important role in the evolution of early life. This is because by damaging DNA and other cell components, the free radicals would have pressured early life to adapt.

ChatGPT is currently deployed on A100 chips that have 80 GB of cache each. Nvidia decided this was a bit wimpy so they developed much faster H100 chips (H100 is about twice as fast as A100) that have 94 GB of cache each and then found a way to put two of them on a card with high speed connections between them for a total of 188 GB of cache per card.

So hardware is getting more and more impressive!

While this year’s Spring GTC event doesn’t feature any new GPUs or GPU architectures from NVIDIA, the company is still in the process of rolling out new products based on the Hopper and Ada Lovelace GPUs its introduced in the past year. At the high-end of the market, the company today is announcing a new H100 accelerator variant specifically aimed at large language model users: the H100 NVL.

Continue reading “NVIDIA Announces H100 NVL — Max Memory Server Card for Large Language Models” »

Society’s outdated ideas about what it means to be alive are obstructing progress on some of today’s most pressing issues.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=_sVK4vpoWus

The Modern Prometheus is a bit too modern to have solely created science fiction, although it did revolutionize it.

Published 7 mins ago.

Using cameras set to monitor the moon, Daichi Fujii, curator of the Hiratsuka City Museum, recorded an event that occurred on February 23 at 20:14:30.8 Japan Standard Time (7:14 a.m. EST, or 1,114 GMT).

While virtually all of the industry is buzzing about AI, accelerated computing and AI powerhouse NVIDIA has just announced a new software library, called cuLitho, that promises an exponential acceleration in chip design development times, as well as reduced chip fab data center carbon footprint and the ability to push the boundaries of bleeding-edge semiconductor design. In fact, NVIDIA cuLitho has already been adopted by the world’s top chip foundry, TSMC, leading EDA chip design tools company Synopsys and chip manufacturing equipment maker ASML.

Industry partners like EDA design tools bellwether Synopsys are chiming in as well, with respect to the adoption of cuLitho and what it can do for their customers that may want to take advantage of the technology. “Computational lithography, specifically optical proximity correction, or OPC, is pushing the boundaries of compute workloads for the most advanced chips,” said Aart de Geus, chair and CEO of Synopsys. “By collaborating with our partner NVIDIA to run Synopsys OPC software on the cuLitho platform, we massively accelerated the performance from weeks to days! The team-up of our two leading companies continues to force amazing advances in the industry.”

As semiconductor fab process nodes get smaller, requiring finer geometry, more complex calculation and photomask patterning, offloading and accelerating these workloads with GPUs makes a lot of sense. In addition, as Moore’s Law continues to slow, cuLitho will also accelerate additional cutting-edge technologies like high NA EUV Lithography, which is expected to help print the extremely tiny and complex features of chips being fabricated at 2nm and smaller.

Continue reading “NVIDIA cuLitho Computational Lithography Massively Accelerates Chip Design Using GPUs” »