supercomputer

Nvidia's graphics brawn powers supercomputing brains

Nvidia, trying to move its graphics chips into the supercomputing market, has found a niche helping engineers build brain-like systems called neural networks.

For years, the company has advocated the idea of offloading processing tasks from general-purposes central processing units (CPUs) to its own graphics processing units (GPUs). That approach has won over some researchers and companies involved with neural networks, which reproduce some of the electrical behavior of real-world nerve cells inside a computer.

Neurons in the real world work by sending electrical signals around the brain, but much of the actual functioning of the brain remains a mystery. … Read more

Chinese supercomputer tops the charts -- two years early

Performing more than 33 quadrillion calculations per second, a new Chinese supercomputer called Tianhe-2 arrived two years earlier than expected to claim the top spot in a list of the 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world.

The Top500 list, updated twice a year at the International Supercomputing Conference, measures performance for mammoth systems typically used for jobs like modeling nuclear weapons explosions and forecasting global climate changes. And the Chinese machine, at the National University of Defense Technology, is more mammoth than most.

The Tianhe-2 has 32,000 Xeon processors boosted by 48,000 Xeon Phi accelerator processors for … Read more

IBM packs 128TB of flash into brain-simulating supercomputer

Drawing from engineering ideas that are revamping personal computers, IBM and two Swiss universities are using flash memory to improve performance of a supercomputer designed to simulate an actual mouse brain.

But there's a lot more flash memory than you'll find in the latest laptop.

A PC's solid-state drive may come with something like 128GB to 512GB of flash memory. The mouse-brain project's specially upgraded version of a Blue Gene/Q supercomputer has 250 to 1,000 times as much flash memory -- 128 terabytes.

The supercomputer project, in conjunction with the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de … Read more

'Blue Waters' supercomputer helps crack HIV code

Scientists have been investigating the structure of the HIV capsid for years; the protein shell protects the virus' genetic material, helps debilitate the infected person's immune system, and is the target for the development of new antiretroviral drugs. Research teams have turned to a wide range of futuristic-sounding techniques to crack the code, from cryo-electron microscopy and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy to cryo-EM tomography and X-ray crystallography.

Now, thanks to a little help from the supercomputer Blue Waters, the mystery finally has been unraveled, according to a research team reporting this week in the journal Nature.… Read more

Google quantum computer lab to study artificial intelligence

Google is opening a new research lab to see if a quantum computer can solve problems too taxing for traditional computers.

Hosted by NASA's Ames Research Center, the new Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab will be home to a quantum computer made by D-Wave Systems. Operated by the Universities Space Research Association, the supercomputer will be available to researchers around the world to work on their own projects.

The goal, as stated in a Google blog posted today, is "to study how quantum computing might advance machine learning."

Traditional computers are limited, as they think in terms of … Read more

Former supercomputer king Roadrunner to shut down today

Four years ago, Roadrunner was the world's fastest supercomputer. But it has lost a step on today's speed leaders and will be shut down today in preparation for dismantling.

Created in 2008 to monitor the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile, the IBM supercomputer was the first system to break the petaflop barrier, hitting 1.026 petaflops shortly after its installation at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. (1 petaflop is equal to a quadrillion, or one thousand trillion, calculations per second.) It would ultimately sit atop of the Top500 supercomputers list three times.

In its five years of operation, … Read more

Big Blue, Big Bang, big data: Telescope funds computing R&D

HANOVER, Germany -- IBM is trying to advance supercomputing technology in processing, optical communications, and memory in conjunction with an international project to peer at the Big Bang's radio remnants.

The radio telescope, called the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), will be built from 2016 to 2024 in southern Africa and Australia. Before that, though, IBM is working to develop the necessary computing technology through a five-year partnership with the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (Astron). At the CeBIT show here, the two groups are showing off some of the fruits of the cooperation, called Dome.

The idea is to … Read more

Titan steals No. 1 spot on Top500 supercomputer list

Predictions that Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Titan supercomputer had become the most powerful machine in the world have turned out to be right.

The machine, powered by Nvidia graphics processors and Advanced Micro Devices computer chips, stole the No. 1 spot on the Top500's list from another U.S. machine, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's Sequoia.

Sequoia, which uses processors from IBM, became the top computer in June with a performance of 16.32 petaflops a second. Titan beat that showing, sending Sequoia to second place on the list, with a result of 17.59 petaflops per second. … Read more

Titan supercomputer debuts for open scientific research

Forecasting for weather like this week's "Frankenstorm" may become a lot more accurate with the help of the Department of Energy's Titan supercomputer, a system that launched this month for open research development.

The computer, an update to the Jaguar system, is operated in Tennessee by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, part of the DOE's network of research labs. Researchers from academia, government labs, and various industries will be able to use Titan -- believed to be one of the two most powerful machines in the world -- to research things such as climate change and … Read more

Supercomputer clicked together from Legos and Raspberry Pi's

The flexible, affordable Raspberry Pi Linux computer system has been hacked, tinkered, and transformed into all sorts of creations since its introduction. There's a Raspberry Pi Apple TV, a Raspberry Pi ocean explorer, and Raspberry Pi smart glasses.

Now there's a Raspberry Pi supercomputer. How do you turn a 700MHz mini system into a supercomputer? You use 64 of them and mount them in a rack made out of Legos.… Read more