Supercomputing – Lifeboat News: The Blog

Dec 8
2020

Quantum Computing Marks New Breakthrough, Is 100 Trillion Times More Efficient

In what could be one of the significant developments in the field of quantum computing, Chinese researchers suggest having achieved quantum supremacy with the capability of performing calculations 100 trillion times faster than the world’s most advanced supercomputer. Researchers from the University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, believe that when put into practical use, it can carry calculations in minutes which would have otherwise taken two billion years to perform. The fastest supercomputers, before this, claimed to have achieved computational efficiency easing up to 10,000 years of calculations.

Jiuzhang, as the supercomputer is called, has outperformed Google’s supercomputer, which the company had claimed last year to have achieved quantum computing supremacy. The supercomputer by Google named Sycamore is a 54-qubit processor, consisting of high-fidelity quantum logic gates that could perform the target computation in 200 seconds.

The researchers explored Boson sampling, a task considered to be a strong candidate to demonstrate quantum computational advantage. As the researcher cited in the research paper, they performed Gaussian boson sampling (GBS), which is a new paradigm of boson sampling, one of the first feasible protocols for quantum computational advantage. In boson sampling and its variants, nonclassical light is injected into a linear optical network, which generates highly random photon-number, measured by single-photon detectors.

Dec 3
2020

A quantum computer that measures light has achieved quantum supremacy

A specialised quantum computer has achieved quantum supremacy, accomplishing in under 4 minutes what would take the biggest supercomputer 600 million years.

Nov 29
2020

JD unveils first phase of its smart city operating system

Since Xi put out the call to build up the new area, China’s tech giants have piled in. Alibaba Group Holding, Tencent Holdings, Baidu, Zhongguancun Science Park and Tsinghua University have all established projects in Xiongan. The projects include the use of sensors, 5G networks and facilities for supercomputing and big data in the pursuit of building up the smart city. Alibaba is the parent company of the Post.

JD Digits, the e-commerce giant’s big data arm, is building a smart city operating system that uses artificial intelligence for urban management.

Nov 26
2020

Trillion-transistor chip breaks speed record

The biggest computer chip in the world is so fast and powerful it can predict future actions “faster than the laws of physics produce the same result.”

That’s according to a post by Cerebras Systems, a startup company that made the claim at the online SC20 supercomputing conference this week.

Working with the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory, Cerebras designed what it calls “the world’s most powerful AI compute system.” It created a massive chip 8.5 inch-square chip, the Cerebras CS-1, housed in a refrigerator-sized computer in an effort to improve on deep-learning training models.

Nov 23
2020

NASA Uses Powerful Supercomputers and AI to Map Earth’s Trees, Discovers Billions of Trees in West African Drylands

Scientists from NASA ’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and international collaborators demonstrated a new method for mapping the location and size of trees growing outside of forests, discovering billions of trees in arid and semi-arid regions and laying the groundwork for more accurate global measurement of carbon storage on land.

Using powerful supercomputers and machine learning algorithms, the team mapped the crown diameter – the width of a tree when viewed from above – of more than 1.8 billion trees across an area of more than 500,000 square miles, or 1,300,000 square kilometers. The team mapped how tree crown diameter, coverage, and density varied depending on rainfall and land use.

Nov 23
2020

The Trillion-Transistor Chip That Just Left a Supercomputer in the Dust

Researchers pitted the biggest computer chip in the world against a supercomputer to simulate combustion—and the megachip won the race by a mile.

Nov 21
2020

Tesla Dojo Supercomputer Explained — How To Make Full Self-Driving AI

Special thanks to Lieuwe Vinkhuyzen for checking that this very simplified view on building neural nets did not stray too far from reality.

The inhabitants of the Tesla fanboy echo chamber have heard regularly about the Tesla Dojo supercomputer, with almost nobody knowing what it was. It was first mentioned, that I know of, at Tesla Autonomy Day on April 22, 2019. More recently a few comments from Georg Holtz, Tesmanian, and Elon Musk himself have shed some light on this project.

Nov 19
2020

Supercomputer Aurora 21 will map the human brain, starting in 2021

Aurora 21 will help the US keep pace among the other nations who own the fastest supercomputers. Scientists plan on using it to map the connectome of the human brain.

Nov 18
2020

‘We can solve this problem in an amount of time that no number of GPUs or CPUs can achieve,’ startup Cerebras tells supercomputing conference

Startup Cerebras benchmarked its pint-sized computer against 16,000 Xeon cores in the DoE’s Joule supercomputer on a problem of computational fluid dynamics.

Nov 13
2020

Quantum internet: the next global network is already being laid

Harun Šiljak, Trinity College Dublin

Google reported a remarkable breakthrough towards the end of 2019. The company claimed to have achieved something called quantum supremacy, using a new type of “quantum” computer to perform a benchmark test in 200 seconds. This was in stark contrast to the 10,000 years that would supposedly have been needed by a state-of-the-art conventional supercomputer to complete the same test.

Despite IBM’s claim that its supercomputer, with a little optimisation, could solve the task in a matter of days, Google’s announcement made it clear that we are entering a new era of incredible computational power.