HPC/Supercomputing

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Like memory in conventional computers, quantum memory components are essential for quantum computers—a new generation of data processors that exploit quantum mechanics and can overcome the limitations of classical computers. With their potent computational power, quantum computers may push the boundaries of fundamental science to create new drugs, explain cosmological mysteries or enhance accuracy of forecasts…

Water is everywhere. Understanding how it behaves at an intersection with another material and how it affects the performance of that material is helpful when trying to develop better products and devices. An undergraduate researcher at Virginia Tech is leading the way. Chemical engineering junior Preeya Achari has now developed and recently published as first author a…

Researchers have been trying for many years to build a quantum computer that industry could scale up, but the building blocks of quantum computing, qubits, still aren’t robust enough to handle the noisy environment of what would be a quantum computer. A theory developed only two years ago proposed a way to make qubits more…

Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory have created the largest simulation to date of an entire gene of DNA, a feat that required one billion atoms to model and will help researchers to better understand and develop cures for diseases like cancer. “It is important to understand DNA at this level of detail because we…

A world-record result in reducing errors in semiconductor “spin qubits,” a type of building block for quantum computers, has been achieved using the theoretical work of quantum physicists at the University of Sydney Nano Institute and School of Physics. The experimental result by University of New South Wales engineers demonstrated error rates as low as 0.043…

Testing nearly 69,000 materials for specific properties was the challenge faced by scientists conducting extensive research on using photocatalytic conversion to reduce the greenhouse gas CO2. The main goal is to find a way to reduce CO2 into chemicals that can provide a source of clean, low-cost renewable energy. But researchers have located very few…