Intel’s new Xeon Phi won’t just power next-generation supercomputers — it’s going to make a debut in workstations as well.
This is the world’s largest nuclear fusion reactor launching this month in Germany. And it was designed by a supercomputer…
The Blue Brain Project is a vast effort by 82 scientists worldwide to digitally recreate the human brain. While still far from that goal, the team revealed a breakthrough that has already provided insight into sleep, memory and neurological disorders. They created a simulation of a third of a cubic millimeter of a rat’s brain. While that might not sound like much, it involves 30,000 neurons and 37 million synapses. In addition, the simulated level of biological accuracy is far beyond anything so far. It allowed them to reproduce known brain activities — such as how neurons respond to touch — and has already yielded discoveries about the brain that were impossible to get biologically.
To create the simulation, researchers did thousands of experiments on rat brains over a 20 year period, logging each type of synapse and neuron discovered. That led to a set of fundamental rules describing how neurons connect to synapses and form microcircuits. Using the data, they developed an algorithm to pinpoint the synapse locations, simulating the circuitry of a rat’s brain. All of that data was then run through a supercomputer: “It was only with this kind of infrastructure that we could solve the billions of equations needed,” said software lead Felix Schurmann.
Blue Brain Project supercomputer recreates part of rodent’s brain with 30,000 neurons connected by 40m synapses to show patterns of behaviour triggered, for example, when whiskers are touched.
A Game Changer in Quantum Computing:
The ingredients for superfast computers could be nearly in place. For the first time, researchers have demonstrated that two silicon transistors acting as quantum bits can perform a tiny calculation.
The advance represents the final physical component needed to realise the promise of super-powerful silicon quantum computers, which harness the science of the very small — the strange behaviour of subatomic particles — to solve computing challenges that are beyond the reach of even today’s fastest supercomputers. Potentially transforming fields like encryption and the search for new pharmaceuticals.
Continue reading “A quantum logic gate in silicon built for the for the first time (w/video)” »
Catalyst: Virtual Universe — The Illustris supercomputer has modelled vast swathes of the universe, allowing us to visualise incredible scenarios in outer space.
Go to the Journeyman Science playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlGSlkijht5iXbPX7d_oTP47c9C3kArQ0
Continue reading “Illustris: The Supercomputer That’s Bringing The Universe To Life” »
A new theory that may explain why dark matter has evaded direct detection in Earth-based experiments has been developed by team of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) particle physicists known as the Lattice Strong Dynamics Collaboration.
The group has combined theoretical and computational physics techniques and used the Laboratory’s massively parallel 2-petaflop Vulcan supercomputer to devise a new model of dark matter. The model identifies today’s dark matter as naturally “stealthy.” But in the extremely high-temperature plasma conditions that pervaded the early universe, it would have been easy to see dark matter via interactions with ordinary matter, the model shows.
Replacing metal wiring with fiber optics could change everything from supercomputers to laptops.
