Scientific Computing

Today’s installment is the third in a series covering how researchers from national laboratories and scientific research centers are updating popular molecular dynamics, quantum chemistry and quantum materials code to take advantage of hardware advances, such as the next-generation Intel Xeon Phi processors. Georgia Institute of Technology, known as Georgia Tech, is an Intel Parallel…

This natural-color Sentinel-2A image features Mexico City and surroundings. Home to nearly nine million people, Mexico City is the densely populated, high-altitude capital of Mexico. Sentinel’s optical camera clearly shows the difference between the densely built city center and the vast surrounding vegetation. The brownish-grey patch in the right corner of the central part of…

My mother bought her first GPS in the 1990s. A few months later, she came home angry because it had directed her to the wrong side of the city, making her an hour late. “That’s too bad,” I said, and we went on with our lives. We both understood that commercial GPS was a new…

This is the second article in a series covering how researchers from national laboratories and scientific research centers are updating popular molecular dynamics, quantum chemistry and quantum materials code to take advantage of hardware advances such as the next-generation Intel Xeon Phi processors. Molecular dynamics research requires use of high performance computing systems and specialized…

On May 17, 2012, the National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center forecasted normal summer temperatures in the Northeast and Midwest United States and a 33 to 40 percent chance of above-normal temperatures for the Southeast. Instead, the regions experienced three separate, record-breaking heat events in June and July that resulted in more than 100 deaths. In the…

Researchers have overcome one of the key challenges to quantum computing by simplifying a complex quantum logic operation. They demonstrated this by experimentally realizing a challenging circuit, the quantum Fredkin gate, for the first time. “The allure of quantum computers is the unparalleled processing power that they provide compared to current technology,” said Dr. Raj Patel from…

MOUNTAIN VIEW — New research suggests that some of Saturn’s icy moons, as well as its famous rings, might be modern adornments. Their dramatic birth may have taken place a mere hundred million years ago, more recent than the reign of many dinosaurs. “Moons are always changing their orbits. That’s inevitable,” says Matija Cuk, principal…

When a hail storm moved through Fort Worth, TX, on May 5, 1995, it battered the highly populated area with hail up to four inches in diameter and struck a local outdoor festival known as the Fort Worth Mayfest. The Mayfest storm was one of the costliest hailstorms in U.S history, causing more than $2…

RENO, NV (AP) — A drone has successfully delivered a package to a residential location in a small Nevada town in what its maker and the governor of the state said was the first fully autonomous urban drone delivery in the U.S. Flirtey CEO Matt Sweeney said the six-rotor drone flew about a half-mile along…

CHAMPAIGN, IL — With record-breaking speeds for fiber-optic data transmission, University of Illinois engineers have paved a fast lane on the information superhighway — creating on-ramps for big data in the process. Graduate researcher Michael Liu presented the research team’s developments in oxide-VCSEL technology, which underpins fiber-optic communications systems, at the Optical Fiber Communication Conference…

Another week gone by, another week of great stories. Supercomputers more powerful than the human mind; the largest scale computer simulations possible; searching for the accurate value of pi; a solution to Selye’s riddle; pi cropping up in lots of unexpected places; seven cool things to know about AI; and refining our picture of Pluto…

Mixtures can be defined as a combination of ingredients where the response is a function of the proportion, rather than the amounts, of the ingredients. Formulation development often boils down to determining the optimum combination of ingredients in a mixture, which can make the difference between success and failure in many diverse fields of research,…

In aerospace, automation and automotive technologies, smart electronic computer systems have to meet a number of security and real-time requirements. In case of critical incidents, for instance, the software’s response time has to be very short. Programming of the corresponding applications is time- and cost-consuming. Partners of industry and research are now developing a tool…

While there is no Hubble telescope gathering data about the universe of human development, projects to make large amounts of information — big data — more accessible to developmental researchers could bring behavioral science’s biggest questions into focus, according to a Penn State psychologist. “Many people, when they think about big data, think about astronomy,…

A team of researchers proposes a “moving-target” defense against distributed denial-of-service attacks. The defense works by repeatedly shuffling client-to-server assignments to identify and eventually quarantine malicious clients. Denial-of-service attacks, which work by overwhelming a target system, thereby forcing it to shut down and deny service to legitimate users, are increasing in severity as assault methods…

New research by engineers from the Universities of Bristol and Lund, working alongside National Instruments (NI), has demonstrated how a massive antenna system can offer a 12-fold increase in spectrum efficiency compared with current 4G cellular technology. Multiple antenna technology, referred to as MIMO, is already used in many Wi-Fi routers and 4G cellular phone…

Associate Professor Julian Togelius works at the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and games — a largely unexplored juncture that he has shown can be the site of visionary and mind-expanding research. Could games provide a better AI test bed than robots, which — despite the way they excite public imagination — can be slow,…

NASA’s open innovation incubator, the International Space Apps Challenge, will take place April 22 to 24, 2016. The global main stage for this year’s event will be in Pasadena, CA, with local events taking place simultaneously in 193 locations spanning 72 countries. On April 23 and 24, participants are asked to develop mobile applications, software, hardware,…

Philanthropist and entrepreneur Paul G. Allen announced an initial commitment of $100 million to create The Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group, whose purpose will be to explore the landscape of bioscience and fund ideas at the frontier of knowledge to advance science and make the world better. As part of the launch, the Frontiers Group…

Molecular dynamics, quantum chemistry and quantum materials researchers use HPC resources to perform highly compute-intensive mathematical calculations and to simulate images of molecular structures. While HPC systems have been updated to increase processing speed and parallelization, many HPC codes are not optimized to take advantage of coming hardware advances, such as next-generation Intel Xeon Phi…

The process for publishing scientific information has followed the same course — write up results, go through peer-review and eventually publish — for hundreds of years. But now, a group of biologists has started to upload papers directly to an open-access preprint site known as bioRxiv. bioRxiv (pronounced “bio-archive”) is a free online archive and…

As more personal information is collected up by ever-more-powerful computers, giant sets of data — big data — have become available for not only legitimate uses but also abuses. Big data has an enormous potential to revolutionize our lives with its predictive power. Imagine a future in which you know what your weather will be…

A research team has released a new version of MEGA (Molecular Evolutionary Genomics Analysis) software, one of the most highly downloaded and widely used tools used by scientists worldwide to harness large-scale DNA sets for comparative studies. At its core, MEGA is a powerful bioinformatics tool designed to help researchers identify key patterns among the…

In previous research, it was suggested that adaptation of an animal to different factors looks like spending of one resource, and that the animal dies when this resource is exhausted. In 1938, Hans Selye introduced “adaptation energy” and found strong experimental arguments in favor of this hypothesis. However, this term has caused much debate because,…

Who doesn’t like puzzles — mathematics puzzles, mental challenges, scientific theories, crosswords, logic puzzles, online games, configurational entropy … Here are a few recent examples of how researchers are succeeding in unraveling amazing challenges. Illuminating the Universe’s Ignition Researchers simulated reionization of the universe with a focus on how it happened in our own neighborhood…