Lifeboat Foundation

“Computers that run on this ‘biological hardware’ could in the next decade begin to alleviate energy-consumption demands of supercomputing.”

Johns Hopkins University researchers have outlined plans for a “bio-computer” that is highly feasible in our lifetime.

“Computing and artificial intelligence have been driving the technology revolution, but they are reaching a ceiling,” Thomas Hartung, a professor of environmental health sciences at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Whiting School of Engineering, who is spearheading the work, said in a statement.

But the computing power necessary for a company to adopt in-house AI capabilities is enormous, and that’s where Nvidia’s new service offering comes in. Dubbed “DGX Cloud,” Nvidia is offering an AI supercomputer accessible to its customers via a web browser. The company partnered with various cloud providers, including Microsoft, Google, and Oracle, to launch the service.

“Nvidia AI as a service offers enterprises easy access to the world’s most advanced AI platform, while remaining close to the storage, networking, security and cloud services offered by the world’s most advanced clouds,” Huang explained.

“Nvidia AI is essentially the operating system of AI systems today,” Huang also said.

Quantum computers are highly energy-efficient and extremely powerful supercomputers. But for these machines to realize their full potential in new applications like artificial intelligence or machine learning, researchers are hard at work at perfecting the underlying electronics to process their calculations. A team at Fraunhofer IZM are working on superconducting connections that measure a mere ten micrometers in thickness, moving the industry a substantial step closer to a future of commercially viable quantum computers.

With the extreme computing power they promise, quantum computers have the potential to become the driving force for technological innovations in all areas of modern industry. By contrast with the run-of-the-mill computers of today, they do not work with bits, but with qubits: No longer are these units of information restricted to the binary states of 1 or 0.

With quantum superposition or entanglement added, qubits mean a great leap forward in terms of sheer speed and power and the complexity of the calculations they can handle. One simple rule still holds, though: More qubits mean more speed and more computing power.

The German company will launch its operating system by the mid of this decade.

German luxury and commercial vehicle brand, Mercedes Benz, has announced its software partnership with Google to offer “super-computer-like” navigation and other services in every car, Reuters.

Mercedes’ plans for the future

Continue reading “Mercedes partners with Google to offer supercomputer-like experience” »

Check out all the on-demand sessions from the Intelligent Security Summit here.

2022 has been a dynamic year for quantum computing. With commercial breakthroughs such as the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) investing in its first quantum computer, the launch of the world’s first quantum computer capable of advantage over the cloud and the Nobel Prize in Physics awarded for ground-breaking experiments with entangled photons, the industry is making progress.

At the same time, 2022 saw the tremendous accomplishment of the exaflop barrier broken with the Frontier supercomputer. At a cost of roughly $600 million and requiring more than 20 megawatts of power, we are approaching the limits of what classical computing approaches can do on their own. Often for practical business reasons, many companies are not able to fully exploit the increasing amount of data available to them. This hampers digital transformation across areas most reliant on high-performance computing (HPC): healthcare, defense, energy and finance.

Not going to happen unless some “doomsdayers” decide to take man back to analog. Perish the thought!

Which brings us to Big Blue – not Big Brother – and its move to take artificial intelligence into the cloud minus all the hardware.

Yes, IBM (and let’s not leave out Red Hat, IBM’s core cloud player) has found another way to tout its cloud computing business by creating what it calls an artificial intelligence-focused supercomputer that exists in the cloud.

Researchers in the US developed a new energy-based benchmark for quantum advantage and used it to demonstrate noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computers that use several orders of magnitude less energy than the world’s most powerful supercomputer. Quantum computing is a branch of computer science that focuses on the development of technologies based on quantum theory principles.

Quantum computing solves problems that are too complex for classical computing by utilizing the unique properties of quantum physics. The question of whether a quantum computer can perform calculations beyond the reach of even the most powerful conventional supercomputer is becoming increasingly relevant as quantum computers become larger and more reliable. This ability, dubbed “quantum supremacy,” marks the transition of quantum computers from scientific curiosity to useful devices. Scientists predict that Quantum computing is better than supercomputers as it performs tasks a million times faster. Quantum computers can handle complex calculations easily because they are built based on quantum principles that go beyond classical physics.

Quantum computers and supercomputers are extremely powerful machines used for complex calculations, problem solving, and data analysis. While both have the potential to revolutionize computing technology, they have significant speed and capability differences. In 2019, Google’s quantum computer performed a calculation that would take the world’s most powerful computer 10,000 years to complete. It is the seed for the world’s first fully functional quantum computer, which will be capable of producing better medicines, developing smarter artificial intelligence, and solving cosmic mysteries. Theoretical physicist John Preskill proposed a formulation of quantum supremacy, or the superiority of quantum computers, in 2012. He dubbed it the moment when quantum computers can perform tasks that ordinary computers cannot. To quickly crunch large amounts of data and achieve a single result, supercomputers employ a traditional computing approach with multiple processors.

New “exascale” supercomputers will bring breakthroughs in science. But the technology also exists to study nuclear weapons.

Researchers from the University of Sussex and Universal Quantum have demonstrated for the first time that quantum bits (qubits) can directly transfer between quantum computer microchips and demonstrated this with record-breaking speed and accuracy. This breakthrough resolves a major challenge in building quantum computers large and powerful enough to tackle complex problems that are of critical importance to society.

Today, quantum computers operate on the 100-qubit scale. Experts anticipate millions of qubits are required to solve important problems that are out of reach of today’s most powerful supercomputers. There is a global quantum race to develop quantum computers that can help in many important societal challenges from drug discovery to making fertilizer production more energy efficient and solving important problems in nearly every industry, ranging from aeronautics to the financial sector.

In the research paper, published today in Nature Communications, the scientists demonstrate how they have used a new and powerful technique, which they dub “UQ Connect,” to use electric field links to enable qubits to move from one quantum computing microchip module to another with unprecedented speed and precision. This allows chips to slot together like a jigsaw puzzle to make a more powerful quantum computer.