supercomputer tagged posts

Adaptive Ferroelectric Materials show Promise for Energy-Efficient Supercomputing

Artistic rendering showing light pulses striking a computer chip.
Artistic rendering representing light pulses yielding adaptive transformations in nanodomain structures applicable to neuromorphic computing. (Image by Argonne National Laboratory/Haidan Wen and Ellen Weiss.)

Researchers have revealed an adaptive response with a ferroelectric device, which responds to light pulses in a way that resembles the plasticity of neural networks. This behavior could find application in energy-efficient microelectronics.

“Today’s supercomputers and data centers demand many megawatts of power,” said Haidan Wen, a physicist at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory. “One challenge is to find materials for more energy-efficient microelectronics...

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Largest Virtual Universe Free for Anyone to Explore

The distribution of dark matter in a snapshot from Uchuu. The images show the dark matter halo of the largest galaxy cluster formed in the simulation at different magnifications. (Credit: Tomoaki Ishiyama) 

An international team of researchers has generated an entire virtual UNIVERSE, and made it freely available on the cloud to everyone.

Uchuu (meaning “Outer Space” in Japanese) is the largest and most realistic simulation of the Universe to date. The Uchuu simulation consists of 2.1 trillion particles in a computational cube an unprecedented 9.63 billion light-years to a side. For comparison, that’s about three-quarters the distance between Earth and the most distant observed galaxies...

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New Molecular Device has unprecedented Reconfigurability reminiscent of Brain-Plasticity

Decision trees within a molecular memristor | Nature
Fig. 1: Circuit element structure and I(V) characteristics

Device can be reconfigured multiple times simply by changing applied voltage. In a discovery published in the journal Nature, an international team of researchers has described a novel molecular device with exceptional computing prowess.

Reminiscent of the plasticity of connections in the human brain, the device can be reconfigured on the fly for different computational tasks by simply changing applied voltages. Furthermore, like nerve cells can store memories, the same device can also retain information for future retrieval and processing.

“The brain has the remarkable ability to change its wiring around by making and breaking connections between nerve cells...

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Supercomputer Turns Back Cosmic Clock

Schematic diagram of the evolution of the Universe from the inflation (left) to the present (right). The “reconstruction method” winds back the evolution from right to left on this illustration to reproduce the primordial density fluctuations from the current galaxy distribution. (Credit: The Institute of Statistical Mathematics)

Astronomers have tested a method for reconstructing the state of the early Universe by applying it to 4000 simulated universes using the ATERUI II supercomputer at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ). They found that together with new observations the method can set better constraints on inflation, one of the most enigmatic events in the history of the Universe...

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