Lifeboat Foundation

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.

Continue reading “US Pursues Next-gen Exascale Systems with 5-10x the Performance of Frontier” »

Chinese computer scientists recently claimed to have run an artificial intelligence program with architecture as complicated as the human brain.

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.

A new exascale supercomputer in China, developed by Sunway, has trained an AI model dubbed bagualu with 174 trillion parameters.

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.

Continue reading “The Startup at the End of the Age : Creating True AI and instigating the Technological Singularity” »

Summary: Researchers present an all-atom molecular dynamic simulation of synaptic vesicle fusion.

Source: Texas Advanced Computing Center.

Let’s think for a second about thought—specifically, the physics of neurons in the brain.

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 laser light, and without destroying the qubit at the same time.

The group’s results could be a major step toward building a quantum internet, 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.