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…
Cooling unit saves half-million gallons of water at Sandia supercomputing center
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…
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid’s latest Magerit-3 supercomputer energizes and enables discovery in nuclear and material physics
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…
Particle physics turns to quantum computing for solutions to tomorrow’s big-data problems
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…
BP looks to ORNL, ADIOS to help rein in data
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…
Nation’s First Exascale-Capable Supercomputer Advances Clean Fusion Research
Argonne Computational Model to Accelerate Engine Development for Hypersonic Flight
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…
Supercomputing Dynamic Earthquake Rupture Models
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…
New German Supercomputer Poised to Significantly Accelerate Research
AI and High-performance Computing Extend Evolution to Superconductors
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…
Quantum Computing Boost From Vapor Stabilizing Technique
Data Science Helps Engineers Discover New Materials for Solar Cells and LEDs
Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed a high-throughput computational method to design new materials for next generation solar cells and LEDs. Their approach generated 13 new material candidates for solar cells and 23 new candidates for LEDs. Calculations predicted that these materials, called hybrid halide semiconductors, would be stable and exhibit…
Quantum Cloud Computing With Self-check
Many scientists are currently working on investigating how quantum advantage can be exploited on hardware already available today. Three years ago, physicists first simulated the spontaneous formation of a pair of elementary particles with a digital quantum computer at the University of Innsbruck. Due to the error rate, however, more complex simulations would require a…
Physicists Create Prototype Superefficient Memory for Future Computers
Researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and their colleagues from Germany and the Netherlands have achieved material magnetization switching on the shortest timescales, at a minimal energy cost. They have thus developed a prototype of energy-efficient data storage devices. The paper was published in the journal Nature. The rapid development of information…
Research Group Uses Supercomputing to Target the Most Promising Drug Candidates From a Daunting Number of Possibilities
Identifying the optimal drug treatment is like hitting a moving target. To stop disease, small-molecule drugs bind tightly to an important protein, blocking its effects in the body. Even approved drugs don’t usually work in all patients. And over time, infectious agents or cancer cells can mutate, rendering a once-effective drug useless. A core physical…
Argonne Scientists Further Physics With Supercomputing, Prepare for Delivery of First U.S. Exascale System
James Proudfoot regularly shares his technical expertise for significant global scientific endeavors. To date, his efforts have supported many projects at Fermilab, his current home base at Argonne National Laboratory, and CERN’s Large Hadron Collider Project (LHC). At CERN in 2012, Proudfoot assisted the team in their successful pursuit of the Higgs Boson. Today, he…
Quantum World-First: Researchers Reveal Accuracy of Two-Qubit Calculations in Silicon
For the first time ever, researchers have measured the fidelity—that is, the accuracy—of two-qubit logic operations in silicon, with highly promising results that will enable scaling up to a full-scale quantum processor. The research, carried out by Professor Andrew Dzurak’s team in UNSW Engineering, was published today in the world-renowned journal Nature. The experiments were performed…
Researchers Train a Neural Network to Study Dark Matter
As cosmologists and astrophysicists delve deeper into the darkest recesses of the universe, their need for increasingly powerful observational and computational tools has expanded exponentially. From facilities such as the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument to supercomputers like Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Cori system at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing (NERSC) facility, they are on…
Generating High-quality Single Photons for Quantum Computing
MIT researchers have designed a way to generate, at room temperature, more single photons for carrying quantum information. The design, they say, holds promise for the development of practical quantum computers. Quantum emitters generate photons that can be detected one at a time. Consumer quantum computers and devices could potentially leverage certain properties of those photons as…
NCSA Scientist Employs Supercomputer Simulations in Ohio Gerrymandering Case
Computing Faster With Quasi-particles
Majorana particles are very peculiar members of the family of elementary particles. First predicted in 1937 by the Italian physicist Ettore Majorana, these particles belong to the group of so-called fermions, a group that also includes electrons, neutrons and protons. Majorana fermions are electrically neutral and also their own anti-particles. These exotic particles can, for…
Researchers Take a Step Toward Light-based, Brain-like Computing Chip
A technology that functions like a brain? In these times of artificial intelligence, this no longer seems so far-fetched—for example, when a mobile phone can recognize faces or languages. With more complex applications, however, computers still quickly come up against their own limitations. One of the reasons for this is that a computer traditionally has…
New Research Will Serve ORNL’s Mission in Computing, Materials R&D
Energy Secretary Rick Perry, Congressman Chuck Fleischmann and lab officials this week broke ground on a multipurpose research facility that will provide state-of-the-art laboratory space for expanding scientific activities at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The new Translational Research Capability, or TRC, will be purpose-built for world-leading research in computing and materials…
Shaping the Future of Finance With HPC
NCSA Faculty Fellow and Assistant Professor at the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois Mao Ye’s research lies at the intersection of big data, high-performance computing and the economics, and finance realm. Using computing resources, Ye tackles large amounts of data currently being collected by companies and finance institutions. “The high-performance computing is more like…
Berkeley Lab Highlights ‘the Little Computer Cluster That Could’
Decades before “big data” and “the cloud” were a part of our everyday lives and conversations, a custom computer cluster based at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) enabled physicists around the world to remotely and simultaneously analyze and visualize data. The Parallel Distributed Systems Facility (PDSF) cluster, which had served…