Roland Piquepaille writes "Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) researchers have used supercomputers to simulate how common ceramics could repair themselves after radiation-induced damages. This is an important discovery because 'materials that can resist radiation damage are needed to expand the use of nuclear energy.' These ceramics, which are able to handle high radiation doses, could improve the durability of nuclear power plants. They also might help to solve the problem of nuclear waste storage. But read more for additional references about how this research could improve nuclear safety."

sciencehabit writes to let us know that physicists are hailing the discovery of a new type of superconductor as a "major advance." The new materials could solve the biggest mystery in condensed matter physics — i.e., how and why cuprate superconductors work — as well as paving the way for practical magnetic levitation and lossless transmission of energy. "God only knows where it will go," says one Nobel Laureate. After the discovery of superconductivity in an iron-and-arsenic compound at 26 kelvin, several Chinese research groups quickly found related materials that are superconducting up to 55K. (Cuprates go as high as 138K; liquid nitrogen boils at 77K.)

KentuckyFC writes "To do anything useful with quantum logic gates, you need dozens to hundreds of them, all joined together. And because of various errors and problems that creep in, that's more or less impossible with today's technology. Now an Australian group has built and tested logic gates that convert qubits into qutrits (three-level quantum states) before processing and then convert them back again. That makes them far more powerful. The group says that a quantum computer that might require 50 conventional quantum logic gates can now be built with just 9 of the new gates. What's more, the gates process photons using nothing more than standard linear optical components (abstract on the physics arxiv)."

Anonymongoose writes "A researcher at Brookhaven National Lab reckons it could be just a few years before computers can pass through the uncanny valley. The article refers to this as a 'Graphics Turing Test': 'a computer can be considered intelligent if it can create an artificial world capable of fooling a person into believing it is the real thing.' Michael McGuigan has been performing some interesting experiments using Brookhaven's Blue Gene/L supercomputer and has shown that it can produce realistic lighting effects in real time. McGuigan's original research paper (pdf) is available online."

ngkabra writes "In November 2007, a previously unheard of supercomputer called EKA, built by CRL, India came out of nowhere to become the 4th fastest supercomputer in the world. It is also the only supercomputer in the top 10 that hasn't taken any government funding — which means it has no strings attached against commercial exploitation. That is one of the reasons why Yahoo! chose EKA for the cloud computing research that they announced at the Hadoop Summit earlier this week. Yesterday, I attended a presentation by the team that built EKA, and they touched upon a lot of the technical details of EKA, and the challenges faced in designing and building it, which makes for interesting reading."

astwon sends us to a blog post by parallel computing pioneer Bill McColl speculating that, with the cooling of Web 2.0, parallelism may be a hot new area for entrepreneurs and investors. (Take with requisite salt grains as he is the founder of a Silicon Valley company in this area.) McColl suggests a few other upcoming "new things," such as Saas as an appliance and massive memory systems. Worth a read.

Hugh Pickens writes "In 1991 Stewart Alsop, the editor of InfoWorld, predicted that the last mainframe computer would be unplugged by 1996. Just last month, IBM introduced the latest version of its mainframe, and technologies from the golden age of big-box computing continue to be vital components in modern infrastructure. The New York Times explores why old technology is still around, using radio and the mainframe as perfect examples. 'The mainframe is the classic survivor technology, and it owes its longevity to sound business decisions. I.B.M. overhauled the insides of the mainframe, using low-cost microprocessors as the computing engine. The company invested and updated the mainframe software, so that banks, corporations and government agencies could still rely on the mainframe as the rock-solid reliable and secure computer for vital transactions and data, while allowing it to take on new chores like running Web-based programs.'"

Bruce Schneier's latest blog entry points out an interesting analysis of how quantum computing will affect public encryption. The author takes a look at some of the mathematics involved with using a quantum computer to run a factoring algorithm, and makes some reasonable assumptions about the technological constraints faced by the developers of the technology. He concludes that while quantum computing could be a threat to modern encryption, it is not the dire emergency some researchers suggest.

Steve Kerrison writes "With the power of CPUs ever-increasing and the number of cores in a system increasing too, having a supercomputer sit under your desk is no longer a pipe dream. But generally speaking, the extreme high end of modern computing consists of a big ugly box housing that generates a lot of noise. A UK system integrator has developed a concept PC that blows that all away. The eXtreme Concept PC (XCP) has quite a romantic design story, with inspiration coming from concept cars and the sarcophagus-like Cray T90. The end result is a system that resembles a Cylon — computing power never looked so ominous. Although just a concept, the company behind the design reckons there could be a (small) market for the systems, with varying levels of compute power accompanied by appropriate (say, LN2) cooling."

schliz notes a development out of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute where researchers have successfully created an artificially intelligent four-year-old capable of reasoning about his beliefs to draw conclusions in a manner that matches human children his age. The technology, which runs on the institute's supercomputing clusters, will be put to use in immersive training and education scenarios. Researchers envision futuristic applications like those seen in Star Trek's holodeck."

wazza brings us a story about the Philippine government's weather service (PAGASA), which has recently used an eight-PC Debian cluster to replace an SGI supercomputer. The system processes data from local sources and the Global Telecommunication System, and it has reduced monthly operational costs by a factor of 20. Quoting: "'We tried several Linux flavours, including Red Hat, Mandrake, Fedora etc,' said Alan Pineda, head of ICT and flood forecasting at PAGASA. 'It doesn't make a dent in our budget; it's very negligible.' Pineda said PAGASA also wanted to implement a system which is very scalable. All of the equipment used for PICWIN's data gathering comes off-the-shelf, including laptops and mobile phones to transmit weather data such as temperature, humidity, rainfall, cloud formation and atmospheric pressure from field stations via SMS into PAGASA's central database."

An anonymous reader writes "Passing the Turing test is the holy grail of artificial intelligence (AI) and now researchers claim it may be possible using the world's fastest supercomputer (IBM's Blue Gene). This version of the Turing test pits a human conversing with a synthetic character powered by Rascals software crafted at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. RPI is aiming to pass AI's final exam this fall, by pairing the most powerful university-based supercomputing system in the world with its new multimedia group which is designing a holodeck, a la Star Trek."

hasu notes that scientists at the National Institute for Materials Science at Tsukuba in Japan have created a device, consisting of 17 duroquinone molecules on a gold surface, that can in theory encode 4.3 billion outcomes. The "device" does not constitute a practical computer, since it requires both a scanning tunneling microscope and operation near absolute zero. A single duroquinone is surrounded by sixteen others, and weak chemical bonds allow a pulse to the central molecule to shift all seventeen molecules in a variety of ways. Each duroquinone has four different "settings," so a single pulse can have 4^16 possible outcomes. As a demonstration the researchers docked 8 other nano-devices to their 17-molecule computer. It is unclear how well they have characterized the inputs that result in 4.3 billion different outputs. They are working on a 3D design that would have 1,024 duroquinone molecules surrounding a central one.

ScienceDaily is reporting that researchers at the University of Edinburgh and Southampton in cooperation with partners from Japan and the US have shed some light on the Standard Model of physics using a new computer model. "The project's enormously complex calculations relate to the behavior of tiny particles found in the nuclei of atoms, known as quarks. In order to carry out these calculations, the researchers first designed and built a supercomputer that was among the fastest in the world, capable of tens of trillions of calculations per second. The computations themselves have taken a further three years to complete. Their result shows that the Standard Model's claim to be the best theory invented holds firm. It raises the stakes for the riddle to be solved by experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, which will switch on later this year. Physicists' efforts to confront Standard Model predictions using the most powerful computers available with the most precise experiments offer no clues about what to expect."

SethJohnson writes "Thanks to a $59 million National Science Foundation grant, there's likely to be a new king of the High Performance Computing Top 500 list. The contender is Ranger, a 15,744 Quad-Core AMD Opteron behemoth built by Sun and hosted at the University of Texas. Its peak processing power of 504 teraflops will be shared among over 500 researchers working across the even larger TeraGrid system. Although its expected lifespan is just four years, Ranger will provide 500 million processor hours to projects attempting to address societal grand challenges such as global climate change, water resource management, new energy sources, natural disasters, new materials and manufacturing processes, tissue and organ engineering, patient-specific medical therapies, and drug design."

Dan100 brings us an announcement that Sandia and Oak Ridge National Laboratories are setting their sights on an exaflop supercomputer. Researchers from the two laboratories jointly launched the Institute for Advanced Architectures to facilitate development. One of the problems they hope to solve is how to provide each core of each processor with enough data so that cycles aren't going to waste. "The idea behind the institute — under consideration for a year and a half prior to its opening — is 'to close critical gaps between theoretical peak performance and actual performance on current supercomputers,' says Sandia project lead Sudip Dosanjh. 'We believe this can be done by developing novel and innovative computer architectures.' The institute is funded in FY08 by congressional mandate at $7.4 million."

The Narrative Fallacy writes "Scott Aaronson has posted a draft of his article from this month's Scientific American on the limitations of quantum computers (PDF) discussing the question: Will quantum computers let us transcend the human condition and become as powerful as gods, or are they a physical absurdity destined to be exposed as the twenty-first century's perpetual-motion machine? Aaronson says that while a quantum computer could quickly factor large numbers, and thereby break most of the cryptographic codes used on the Internet today, there's reason to think that not even a quantum computer could solve the crucial class of NP-complete problems efficiently. Aaronson contends that any method for solving NP-complete problems in polynomial time may violate the laws of physics and that this may be a fundamental limitation on technology no different than the second law of thermodynamics or the impossibility of faster-than-light communication."

anzha writes "It seems that that Linux Networx, the pioneering Linux supercomputing company, has gone belly up. SGI announced that it has bought the core assets of LNXI. Furthermore, the rumors are that the doors were locked and employees were just given their paychecks. This analysis, on the other hand, claims that SGI has 'made employment offers to many LNXI engineers.' It's unclear what kind of support will be extended to customers of LNXI's Clusterworx Advanced products. What does this mean for the future of Linux supercomputing?"

An anonymous reader writes "IBM has published a research paper describing an initiative called Project Kittyhawk, aimed at building "a global-scale shared computer capable of hosting the entire Internet as an application." Nicholas Carr describes the paper with the words "Forget Thomas Watson's apocryphal remark that the world may need only five computers. Maybe it needs just one." Here is the original paper."

Jack Spine writes "A robotics researcher at Accenture has given a demonstration of a 'Pocket Supercomputer' — a phone behaving like a thin client. It can be used to send images and video of objects in real time to a server where they can be identified and linked to relevant information, which can then be sent back to the user. 'The camera on the phone is used to take a video of an object — such as a book ... By offloading the processing from a mobile device onto a server, there are few limits on the size and processing power available to be used for the storage and search of images.' To pinpoint the features necessary to identify an object, the image is run through an algorithm called Scale-Invariant Feature Transform, or SIFT, a technology developed by academic David Lowe. The software extracts feature points from a jpeg and makes a match against images in the database. If a match exists then the software on the server retrieves information and sends it back to the user's phone. A 'three-dimensional' image of an object can also be uploaded onto the phone, to look at the virtual object from different angles. The motion-tracking technology Accenture uses for this is a free library of algorithms called Open Computer Vision."