Lifeboat Foundation

Another pre-Quantum Computing interim solution for super computing. So, we have this as well as Nvidia’s GPU. Wonder who else?

In summer 2015, US president Barack Obama signed an order intended to provide the country with an exascale supercomputer by 2025. The machine would be 30 times more powerful than today’s leading system: China’s Tianhe-2. Based on extrapolations of existing electronic technology, such a machine would draw close to 0.5GW – the entire output of a typical nuclear plant. It brings into question the sustainability of continuing down the same path for gains in computing.

One way to reduce the energy cost would be to move to optical interconnect. In his keynote at OFC in March 2016, Professor Yasuhiko Arakawa of University of Tokyo said high performance computing (HPC) will need optical chip to chip communication to provide the data bandwidth for future supercomputers. But digital processing itself presents a problem as designers try to deal with issues such as dark silicon – the need to disable large portions of a multibillion transistor processor at any one time to prevent it from overheating. Photonics may have an answer there as well.

Continue reading “Can optical technology solve the high performance computing energy conundrum?” »

I see great potential for the TrueNorth chip as we migrate towards Quantum & Singularity. TrueNorth is an interim chip that assists researchers, engineers, etc. in their efforts to mimic the human brain’s nuero sensors and processing for robotics, BMI technology, etc.

The new IBM supercomputer chip mimics the human brain by using an architecture with 1 million neurons. Nevertheless, its true purpose remains in question for a project with massive public funding.

Good trivia.

Julius Caesar set out to destroy the original Library of Alexandria: if only he could see the new resources the researchers have access to now.

Interesting; however, I can not wait to see Nividia’s new car especially with their new GPU chip & DGX-1 technology.

While companies such as Google chase the fully autonomous car, Toyota is taking a more measured approach toward a “guardian angel” car that would seize control only when an accident is imminent.

But as starkly different as those approaches are, they both will require a wide range of data-intensive technologies, according to Gill Pratt (pictured), chief executive officer of the Toyota Research Institute, a research center focused on AI and robotics. He spoke at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose today.

Continue reading “Toyota’s ‘guardian angel’ cars will be supercomputers on wheels” »

Nvidia’s interim solution to QC.

Nvidia has announced a new deep learning system for supercomputers, deep learning, and artificial intelligence firms, alongside a new high-end GPU.

The theoretical results of a piece of international research published in Nature, whose first author is Ion Errea, a researcher at the UPV/EHU and DIPC, suggest that the quantum nature of hydrogen (in other words, the possibility of it behaving like a particle or a wave) considerably affects the structural properties of hydrogen-rich compounds (potential room-temperature superconducting substances). This is in fact the case of the superconductor hydrogen sulphide: a stinking compound that smells of rotten eggs, which when subjected to pressures a million times higher than atmospheric pressure, behaves like a superconductor at the highest temperature ever identified. This new advance in understanding the physics of high-temperature superconductivity could help to drive forward progress in the search for room-temperature superconductors, which could be used in levitating trains or next-generation supercomputers, for example.

Superconductors are materials that carry electrical current with zero electrical resistance. Conventional or low-temperature ones behave that way only when the substance is cooled down to temperatures close to absolute zero (−273 °C o 0 degrees Kelvin). Last year, however, German researchers identified the high-temperature superconducting properties of hydrogen sulphide which makes it the superconductor at the highest temperature ever discovered: −70 °C or 203 K.

Beautiful future lays ahead in QC.

Quantum physics not only explains how matter behaves at the subatomic level, but is also used to create many devices in our everyday lives, from lasers and transistors to GPS and mobile phones. The next wave of innovation could lead to unbreakable encryption and computers that are up to one million times faster. On 6 April, Parliament’s Science and Technology Options Assessment (STOA) unit organised a workshop to discuss with experts the potential of these new quantum technologies.

Exploiting the quirks of the quantum world

Continue reading “Quantum technologies: from mobile phones to supercomputers” »

Big day for Nvidia with announcements on AI and VR.

The first day of the company’s GPU Technology Conference was chock full of self-driving cars, trips to Mars, and more.

Could we see race car driver careers become all AI? Nvidia is testing the concept.

Formula E is going completely autonomous with the all-new Roborace series slated for the upcoming race season. At its GTC developer conference, Nvidia announced these autonomous, electric race cars will be powered by Nvidia Drive PX 2, a supercomputer built for self-driving cars.

Drive PX 2 is powered by 12 CPU cores and four Pascal GPUs that provides eight teraflops of computer power. The supercomputer-in-a-box is vital to deep learning and trains artificial intelligence to adapts to different driving conditions, including asphalt, rain and dirt.

Continue reading “Here’s how Nvidia is powering an autonomous, electric race car” »