Scientific Computing

Written by Shannon Brescher Shea A computer is suspended from the ceiling. Delicate lines and loops of silvery wires and tubes connect gold-colored platforms. It seems to belong in a science-fiction movie, perhaps a steam-punk cousin of HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey. But as the makers of that 1968 movie imagined computers the size…

DISCUS Software Company, headquartered in Columbus, OH, has announced a premier authorized partnership agreement with Adaptive Corporation. Adaptive will sell and support DISCUS’ First Article Inspection (FAI) software solutions to businesses operating in aerospace, defense, automotive, medical and various other manufacturing industries that have stringent quality requirements. DISCUS specializes in automation of the first article…

Pico Technology announces the PicoScope 6000E Series FlexRes oscilloscopes, featuring 8 channels with 500 MHz bandwidth, 16 digital channels, and resolution of 8, 10 or 12 bits. The products work with PicoScope 6 application software, which takes full advantage of the latest PC performance and display capabilities, showing clean, crisp waveforms on screens of any…

Purdue innovators are at Silicon Valley’s premier chip-design conference to unveil technology that is 100 times more resilient to electromagnetic attacks to secure Internet of Things devices. Security of embedded devices is essential in today’s internet-connected world. Security is typically guaranteed mathematically using a small secret key to encrypt the private messages. When these computationally…

A cooling unit installed on the roof of Sandia National Laboratories’ supercomputer center saved 554,000 gallons of water during its first six months of operation last year, says David J. Martinez, engineering project lead for Sandia’s Infrastructure Computing Services. The dramatic decrease in water use, important for a water-starved state, could be the model for…

The exponential growth in computer processing power seen over the past 60 years may soon come to a halt. Complex systems such as those used in weather forecasting, for example, require high computing capacities, but the costs for running supercomputers to process large quantities of data can become a limiting factor. Researchers at Johannes Gutenberg…

Rice University engineers have created a deep learning computer system that taught itself to accurately predict extreme weather events, like heat waves, up to five days in advance using minimal information about current weather conditions. Ironically, Rice’s self-learning “capsule neural network” uses an analog method of weather forecasting that computers made obsolete in the 1950s.…

In recent months, the FBI issued a high-impact cybersecurity warning in response to increasing attacks on government targets. Government officials have warned major cities that such hacks are a disturbing trend that is likely to continue. A new tool from Purdue University researchers may help stop some of those threats. The Purdue team created a…

By Ken Strandberg The European X-ray Free-electron Laser (European XFEL), recently completed its first experiments that captured images of an antibiotic-disabling enzyme. Scientists use X-rays to bombard molecules and project molecular smatterings on a sensor that reconstructs what the target looks like.  With these high-energy X-rays we now have 3D visualizations of actual molecules, like…

An international team of researchers has discovered the hydrogen atoms in a metal hydride material are much more tightly spaced than had been predicted for decades — a feature that could possibly facilitate superconductivity at or near room temperature and pressure. Such a superconducting material, carrying electricity without any energy loss due to resistance, would…

Giant-scale physics experiments are increasingly reliant on big data and complex algorithms fed into powerful computers, and managing this multiplying mass of data presents its own unique challenges. To better prepare for this data deluge posed by next-generation upgrades and new experiments, physicists are turning to the fledgling field of quantum computing to find faster…

Southwest Research Institute is introducing Floodlight™, a novel software tool that efficiently discovers the vast numbers of chemical components—previously known and unknown—present in the food, air, drugs and products we are exposed to every day. This cheminformatics machine learning tool integrates algorithms with analytical chemistry software to provide deep analysis of gas chromatography mass spectrometry…

Researchers across the scientific spectrum crave data, as it is essential to understanding the natural world and, by extension, accelerating scientific progress. Lately, however, the tools of scientific endeavor have become so powerful that the amount of data obtained from experiments and observations is often unwieldy. In other words, it is possible to have too…

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed a quantum chemistry simulation benchmark to evaluate the performance of quantum devices and guide the development of applications for future quantum computers. Their findings were published in npj Quantum Information. Quantum computers use the laws of quantum mechanics and units known as qubits…

A nationwide alliance of national labs, universities, and industry launched today to advance the frontiers of quantum computing systems designed to solve urgent scientific challenges and maintain U.S. leadership in next-generation information technology. The Quantum Information Edge strategic alliance is led by two of the U.S. Department of Energy’s national laboratories: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory…

MIT researchers have devised a method that accelerates the process for creating and customizing templates used in medical-image analysis, to guide disease diagnosis. One use of medical image analysis is to crunch datasets of patients’ medical images and capture structural relationships that may indicate the progression of diseases. In many cases, analysis requires use of…

Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have come up with a way to manipulate tungsten diselenide (WSe2)—a promising two-dimensional material—to further unlock its potential to enable faster, more efficient computing, and even quantum information processing and storage. Their findings were published today in Nature Communications. Across the globe, researchers have been heavily focused on a class of…

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, working in collaboration with Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and Convergent Science Inc., have created a new numerical modeling tool that allows for a better understanding of a powerful engine that could one day propel the next generation of airplanes and rockets. Rotating detonation…

Some of the world’s most powerful earthquakes involve multiple faults, and scientists are using supercomputers to better predict their behavior. Multi-fault earthquakes can span fault systems of tens to hundreds of kilometers, with ruptures propagating from one segment to the other. During the last decade, scientists have observed several cases of this complicated type of…

There’s a joke by comedian Steven Wright that goes, “You can’t have everything. Where would you put it?” Users of advanced computing can likely relate to this. The exponential growth of data poses a steep challenge to efforts for its reliable storage. For over 12 years, the Ranch system at the Texas Advanced Computing Center…

Owners of thoroughbred stallions carefully breed prizewinning horses over generations to eke out fractions of a second in million-dollar races. Materials scientists have taken a page from that playbook, turning to the power of evolution and artificial selection to develop superconductors that can transmit electric current as efficiently as possible. Perhaps counterintuitively, most applied superconductors…