Mordok-DestroyerOfWo writes "Researchers from the IBM Almaden research lab and the University of Nevada have created a simulation of half a mouse brain on the BlueGene L supercomputer. 'Half a real mouse brain is thought to have about eight million neurons each one of which can have up to 8,000 synapses, or connections, with other nerve fibres. Modelling such a system, the trio wrote, puts "tremendous constraints on computation, communication and memory capacity of any computing platform."' Although there's more to creating a mind than setting up the infrastructure, does this mean that we may see a system for human mental storage within our lifetimes?"

A bunch of readers sent us word on the prototype for a new general-purpose processor with the potential of reaching trillions of calculations per second. TRIPS (obligatory back-formation given in the article) was designed and built by a team at the University of Texas at Austin. The TRIPS chip is a demonstration of a new class of processing architectures called Explicit Data Graph Execution. Each TRIPS contains two processing cores, each of which can issue 16 operations per cycle with up to 1,024 instructions in flight simultaneously. The article claims that current high-performance processors typically are designed to sustain a maximum execution rate of four operations per cycle.

Roland Piquepaille writes "If you want to predict how a tall building can resist to an earthquake, some researchers have better tools than others. Engineers from the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) have built a full-size 275-ton building and really shaken it to obtain earthshaking images. The building was equipped with some 600 sensors and filmed as the shake table simulated the 1994 Northridge earthquake in Los Angeles, California. It gave so much data to the engineers to analyze that they needed a supercomputer to help them. Now they hope their study will yield to better structure performance for future buildings in case of earthquakes."

Roland Piquepaille writes "A team of German physicists at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics has built a single-photon server with just one atom. They've trapped ultra cold atoms of rubidium in a vacuum chamber and applied laser pulses from one side. The generated photons were of 'high quality,' meaning their energy was very similar from one test to another, and that their properties could be controlled. The researchers think this new way to generate single photons will help the field of quantum information processing. "

isaachulvey asks: "If you could put together your dream machine with any components you want, what would it be? Obviously price is not a factor here or we'd all be putting together 800 MHz systems with 128 MB of RAM. This is your dream machine, so be creative, go as over the top as you need, remember overkill is not a crime."

Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "The start-up Lightfleet has developed an unusual way to use lasers to speed the flow of data inside a computer, hoping to break a bottleneck that can hamper machines using many microprocessors, the Wall Street Journal reports. The company plans to sell servers it predicts will be much more efficient than existing systems in tackling tough computing problems. Tasks could include automatically recognizing a face in a video image or sifting through billions of financial transactions for signs of illegal activity. These machines will attempt to sidestep some of the problems associated with parallel computation by ensuring all processors are connected, all the time."

prostoalex writes "Canadian company D-Wave Systems is getting some technology press buzz after successfully demonstrating their quantum computer (discussed here earlier) that the company plans to rent out. Scientific American has a more technical description of how the quantum computer works, as well as possible areas of application: 'The quantum computer was given three problems to solve: searching for molecular structures that match a target molecule, creating a complicated seating plan, and filling in Sudoku puzzles.' Another attendee provides some videos from the demo." Anyone want to guess how long before "qubit" gets compressed to "quit" (as "bigit" became "bit" in the last century)?

starheight writes "Bill McColl has written an article contrasting traditional massively parallel supercomputing with a whole new generation of compute-intensive apps that require massively scalable architectures and can deliver both incredible throughput and real-time responsivenes when processing millions or billions of tasks."

Jagdeep Poonian writes "It appears as though Intel has been able to squeeze 1.8 TFlops out of one processor and with a power consumption of 62 watts." The AP version of the story is mostly the same; a more technical examination of TeraScale is also available.

judgecorp writes "D-Wave Systems of British Columbia is all set to demonstrate a 16-qubit quantum computer. Simple devices have been built in the lab before, and this is still a prototype, but it is a commercial project that aims to get quantum devices into computer rooms, solving tricky problems such as financial optimization. Most quantum computers have to be isolated from the outside world (look at them and they stop working). This one is an 'adiabatic' quantum computer — which means (in theory, says D-Wave) that it can live with thermal noise and give results without having to be isolated. There's a description of it here — and pretty pictures too."

eldavojohn writes "Google & NASA announced their partnership today with many benefits. The director of a NASA site said 'Just a few examples are new sensors and materials from collaborations on bio-info-nano convergence, improved analysis of engineering problems, as well as Earth, life and space science discoveries from supercomputing and data mining, and bringing entrepreneurs into the space program.'" Update 23:51 by SM As pointed out by so many readers the GoogleNASA site originally linked was completely bogus.

nanotrends writes "Steve Chen was the principal designer of the Cray X-MP supercomputer. He recently created multi-teraflop blade based supercomputers for a Chinese company. He is now creating a supercomputer grid across China and he is working on a bio-supercomputer extension to human brains called THIRD-BRAIN. The THIRD-BRAIN project has significant 3 year and 5 year targets."

snedecor writes "DARPA has awarded a third round of funding for the next-generation petascale computing system. IBM and Cray roughly split the $494M, while Sun, with little track record, received none. This is in spite of Sun's radical proposal for proximity communication."

the_psilo writes, "My friend just got back from the Supercomputing conference in Tampa, FL where she and the rest of the Purdue Envision Center rocked the High Performance Computing Bandwidth Challenge by streaming a 2-minute-long, 125-GB movie over a 10-Gb link at 7.5 Gb/sec. They used 6 Apple Xserve RAIDs connected to 12 clients projecting onto their tiled wall (that's 12 streams in all). Lots of accolades from the people who set up the challenge. More links to articles and reviews can be found at the Envision Center Bandwidth Challenge FAQ page." The two-minute video is a scientific visualization of a cell structure from a bacterium. The Envision Center site hosts a reduced version of the video.

geaux writes to let us know about the release of the 28th TOP500 List of the world's fastest supercomputers. From the article: "The IBM BlueGene/L system, installed at DOE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, retains the No. 1 spot with a Linpack performance of 280.6 teraflops (trillions of calculations per second, or Tflop/s). The new No. 2 systems is Sandia National Laboratories' Cray Red Storm supercomputer, only the second system ever to be recorded to exceed the 100 Tflops/s mark with 101.4 Tflops/s... Slipping to No. 3 is the IBM eServer Blue Gene Solution system, installed at IBM's Thomas Watson Research Center, with 91.20 Tflops/s Linpack performance." You need over 6.6 Tflop/s to make it into the top 100.

evanwired writes "Revolution is a word that's often thrown around with little thought in high tech circles, but this one looks real. Wired News has a comprehensive report on computer scientists' efforts to adapt graphics processors for high performance computing. The goal for these NVidia and ATI chips is to tackle non-graphics related number crunching for complex scientific calculations. NVIDIA announced this week along with its new wicked fast GeForce 8800 release the first C-compiler environment for the GPU; Wired reports that ATI is planning to release at least some of its proprietary code to the public domain to spur non-graphics related development of its technology. Meanwhile lab results are showing some amazing comparisons between CPU and GPU performance. Stanford's distributed computing project Folding@Home launched a GPU beta last month that is now publishing data putting donated GPU performance at 20-40 times the efficiency of donated CPU performance."

We posted Jay Rosen's Call for Questions on September 25. Here are his answers, into which he's obviously put plenty of time and thought. This is a "must read" for anyone interested in the growing "citizen journalism" movement either as a writer/editor or as an audience member -- and please note that Rosen and many others say, over and over, that one of the major shifts in the news media, especially online, is that there is no longer any need to be one or the other instead of both.

Anonymous Coward writes "The most powerful supercomputer available for general scientific research in the United States has undergone an upgrade that's doubled its peak performance. The Cray XT3 supercomputer at Tennessee's Oak Ridge National Laboratory can now perform up to 54 trillion calculations per second, up from its previous peak of 25 trillion calculations. 'It is probably the fifth-fastest machine' in the world, said Thomas Zacharia, associate laboratory director. 'It is clearly the fastest open-science machine in the U.S. today.'"

nanotrends writes "Gordie Rose, the CTO of Dwave Systems, the venture funded company that plans to offer paid use of a superconducting quantum computer starting in 2007, reveals secrets of his quantum computer construction. It is based on nobium superconducting 'circuits of atoms' and is not RSFQ. (Rapid Single Flux quantum)."

An anonymous reader writes "Penn State computer science professor Max Fomitchev explains that computing has evolved in a spiral pattern from a centralized model to a distributed model that retains some aspects of centralized computing. Single-task PC operating systems (OSes) evolved into multitasking OSes to make the most of increasing CPU power, and the introduction of the graphical user interface at the same time reduced CPU performance and fueled demands for even more efficiencies. "The role of CPU performance is definitely waning, and if a radical new technology fails to materialize quickly we will be compelled to write more efficient code for power consumption costs and reasons," Fomitchev writes. Slow, bloated software entails higher costs in terms of both direct and indirect power consumption, and the author reasons that code optimization will likely involve the replacement of blade server racks with microblade server racks where every microblade executes a dedicated task and thus eats up less power. The collective number of microblades should also far outnumber initial "macro" blades. Fully isolating software components should enhance the system's robustness thanks to the potential of real-time component hot-swap or upgrade and the total removal of software installation, implementation, and patch conflicts. The likelihood of this happening is reliant on the factor of energy costs, which directly feeds into the factor of code optimization efficiency."