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Posts Tagged ‘computers’

Aspuru-Guzik and the rest of the Clean Energy Project are using distributed computing to search for an organic molecule that will make a more efficient solar cell. More efficient than silicon solar cells, anyway, which are ten times more expensive than other energy sources. Distributed computing uses multiple PCs around the web and harnesses them to get the equivalent processing power of a supercomputer. Many other projects are using this method to work on cures for Alzheimer's, cancer and other diseases, to detect earthquakes early, and to search for extraterrestrial life.

The Clean Energy Project has been searching for more than two years, inspecting more than two million molecules to find the one that will put solar power on level ground with other energy sources. Recently, they found a molecule that is one of the best organic semiconductors discovered to date. Synthetic chemist Zhenan Bao made and tested the chemical, finding it to work between three and four times better than the team predicted.

By 2012, the project is expected to have examined 3.5 million molecules. If you want to contribute to the effort, download the Clean Energy Project's screensaver, which will allow the project to borrow your computer power whenever you're idle.

[Wired]

In the first study, researchers at the University of California-Santa Barbara say they’ve built the first working quantum computer chip based on the von Neumann system. Named for the engineer who designed the concept, the von Neumann architecture combines processors and memory, and it’s the basis for every computer out there. (With one notable recent exception.)

This quantum CPU (quCPU?) is a big breakthrough, because quantum computers by definition are difficult to design. They’re based on the concept of superposition — that a quantum bit, or qubit, can exist in two different states at once. Put another way, it can be a 0 or a 1 at the same time, and it can therefore perform calculations more quickly than a system based on 0 or 1. But it’s hard to keep the qubits in a state in which this is possible, and interfering with them — i.e., reading their data — can destroy their superposition capabilities. So, a system that integrates random access memory into the qubits is a big step toward a working computer.

Researchers at UCSB super-chilled their quCPU to near absolute zero and performed a few calculations. Quantum information traveled back and forth among storage and processing elements, and the system performed pretty well — not perfectly, but it’s a start. They also found that the quantum memory can retain information for much longer periods than the qubits, which is also a good sign.

Next, the team is trying to increase the number of quantum devices integrated on a single chip, and they’re studying different metallic materials to make this easier, according to Physics World.

In another quantum paper, researchers in Austria report building the first working quantum simulator — kind of like a quantum computer, but different in scope. It can be used to model the behavior of quantum systems, which can potentially help improve quantum computers.

It would be useful for many reasons to model the behavior of quantum systems, but this is impossible with a traditional computer, as Richard Feynman figured out in 1982. It would take exponential time, with the system working more and more slowly as the calculations increased in number. For a general description of a quantum spin system with 300 particles, a computer would need more memory than exists in the world — even if all of the observable matter in the universe was processed into memory, as the Austrian researchers put it last year. But a quantum simulator, which can complete so many more calculations, would not experience this slowdown. To make one of these, you would have to very carefully control the setup of the simulator, and this is what the Austrians have done.

The team used six laser-cooled calcium atoms as qubits, and used laser pulses to initiate calculations. They found the system could simulate several types of interacting spin systems, according to Science magazine, which published both papers today. The simulator can be reprogrammed to simulate any type of quantum system, the researchers say.

Given breakthroughs like these, quantum computers may be closer than ever.

[Science, Physics World]

In the first study, researchers at the University of California-Santa Barbara say they’ve built the first working quantum computer chip based on the von Neumann system. Named for the engineer who designed the concept, the von Neumann architecture combines processors and memory, and it’s the basis for every computer out there. (With one notable recent exception.)

This quantum CPU (quCPU?) is a big breakthrough, because quantum computers by definition are difficult to design. They’re based on the concept of superposition — that a quantum bit, or qubit, can exist in two different states at once. Put another way, it can be a 0 or a 1 at the same time, and it can therefore perform calculations more quickly than a system based on 0 or 1. But it’s hard to keep the qubits in a state in which this is possible, and interfering with them — i.e., reading their data — can destroy their superposition capabilities. So, a system that integrates random access memory into the qubits is a big step toward a working computer.

Researchers at UCSB super-chilled their quCPU to near absolute zero and performed a few calculations. Quantum information traveled back and forth among storage and processing elements, and the system performed pretty well — not perfectly, but it’s a start. They also found that the quantum memory can retain information for much longer periods than the qubits, which is also a good sign.

Next, the team is trying to increase the number of quantum devices integrated on a single chip, and they’re studying different metallic materials to make this easier, according to Physics World.

In another quantum paper, researchers in Austria report building the first working quantum simulator — kind of like a quantum computer, but different in scope. It can be used to model the behavior of quantum systems, which can potentially help improve quantum computers.

It would be useful for many reasons to model the behavior of quantum systems, but this is impossible with a traditional computer, as Richard Feynman figured out in 1982. It would take exponential time, with the system working more and more slowly as the calculations increased in number. For a general description of a quantum spin system with 300 particles, a computer would need more memory than exists in the world — even if all of the observable matter in the universe was processed into memory, as the Austrian researchers put it last year. But a quantum simulator, which can complete so many more calculations, would not experience this slowdown. To make one of these, you would have to very carefully control the setup of the simulator, and this is what the Austrians have done.

The team used six laser-cooled calcium atoms as qubits, and used laser pulses to initiate calculations. They found the system could simulate several types of interacting spin systems, according to Science magazine, which published both papers today. The simulator can be reprogrammed to simulate any type of quantum system, the researchers say.

Given breakthroughs like these, quantum computers may be closer than ever.

[Science, Physics World]

Usually we’d spend the second paragraph telling you why, but in this case we just don’t know. IBM said the supercomputer became more expensive and more complex than the company foresaw. A company spokeswoman said IBM is capable of meeting the technological goals outlined for the project, but nonetheless it is choosing not to.

That’s all a bit odd. The computer, known as Blue Waters, is a building-sized behemoth costing roughly half a billion dollars, much of which was funded by the National Science Foundation. It was based on IBM’s Power7 series chip that is not yet on the market. Which makes one wonder if there was a problem with the chip or with the architecture of the computer itself. Or maybe upon building the first few racks of hardware the computer started to think for itself (with few answers to work with, we’re taking license to speculate here).

But the world’s biggest, baddest academic computer isn’t necessarily lost. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (you may remember it from our coverage of U. of Illinois’ Advanced Visualization Lab earlier this year), which is heading the effort, is seeking other means to finish the computer without IBM. But it only has a few weeks to get another plan in front of the NSF.

Unfortunately, this kind of hardware doesn’t exactly exist in plug-and-play format, so we’ll have to wait and see if some other chip developer can step in and make the NCSA’s new supercomputer as super as it was supposed to be.

[Chronicle of Higher Education]

The hacks are tied together into a single ongoing event by the fact that they were discovered via the log contents of a central “command and control” server being examined by McAfee investigators beginning in 2009. McAfee investigators dubbed the attack “Operation Shady RAT,” with RAT short for “remote access tool,” the common umbrella term for the software hackers and security types use to access networks from afar.

So who was attacked? Reuters' highlight reel:

The long list of victims in the five-year campaign include the governments of the United States, Taiwan, India, South Korea, Vietnam and Canada; the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN); the International Olympic Committee (IOC); the World Anti-Doping Agency; and an array of companies, from defense contractors to high-tech enterprises.

And China, right? Surely if someone was going to hack big targets in the U.S. and Europe, the IOC, the UN, and every major economic player in Asia/Indochina, that person surely wouldn’t overlook China, the biggest player of them all, right? No? That’s interesting.

I’m not the only one who thinks so. Cyber experts not affiliated with McAfee say everything points to the Chinese--the keen interest in Taiwan, the hacking of the IOC prior to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the defense contractors and high-tech companies whose trade secrets could be exploited. All of this information might be interesting to anyone. But it would be especially interesting to China.

China has not issued an official comment on the hack-a-thon. But if they had, we can assume it would be something along the lines of: “Who, me?”

[Reuters]

In all seriousness, the problem of “infinite loops” is beyond annoying. It saps productivity from software (and those using it). Infinite loops occur when a program gets stuck executing a single block of code over and over again (you probably know this as “freezing” or “f*&k!”). They often occur during functions where a program is trying to perform a task on many pieces of data in sequence, like when it searches for a word in a document for instance.

The problem occurs when the program, for whatever reason, doesn’t know when to stop repeating that operation, or executing that same segment of code repeatedly. Hence the term loop. And hence your frustration, as now your program won’t let you do anything else, including save your progress. So MIT researchers built a sort of crash cart for frozen programs that can shake them from an infinite loop, moving them along to the next logical block of code.

The program, appropriately named Jolt, recognizes infinite loops by examining the program’s use of memory. Say your program appears to be stalled. When you run Jolt, it takes a look at the program’s memory after each repetition of that loop. If there’s a change after each execution, your program is probably doing something useful. If not, it’s simply hung up in an infinite loop. Jolt then looks for the first instruction that follows the code the program is stuck on and forces the program to move ahead (for you programming types who are interested, there’s a much more thorough nuts-and-bolts description over at MIT News).

That forced procedure may not restore the program to full functionality--for instance, Jolt (and its binary cousin Bolt) may not push the program to the correct next instruction--but ideally it will at least put the program in a state where you can save, quit, and relaunch. That beats retyping your term paper. After all, you stayed up all night just to get it finished.

[MIT News]

Using point-cloud construction rather than polygons, the software promises digital environments that are 100,000 times more detailed than the current state of the art

Now Dell is back with a company called Euclideon and a new video describing the progress he’s made on his software over the last year. And again, it looks pretty impressive if completely unverifiable.

The idea, on its face, doesn’t sound impossible. Basically, Unlimited Detail eschews the usual polygon shape construction for a point-cloud construction for his virtual environments. But an infinite number of 3-D atoms would require an infinite amount of computing power to render. Even a small number of detailed point-cloud objects would require tons of computational wherewithal.

Unlimited Detail circumvents the computing power problem, Dell says, by acting like a search engine that figures out, in real time, which points need to be rendered to create a certain view from a certain perspective. So only the “atoms” that are being viewed in a given frame from a certain perspective are actually rendered at any given time. The rest go un-rendered in the background. Less rendering means less computing power consumed.

In the video below, Dell describes in perfect exhilarated-Aussie just how awesome this technology could make our video game worlds and other virtual environments. Unlimited Detail can now pack one million atoms into a single virtual cubic inch, allowing for unprecedented detail. And it could make such environments less virtual, allowing game designers to “scan” in objects from the real world and present them as they look naturally, making video game worlds a kind of hybrid reality with some parts real and some parts engineered by artists.

This is all assuming that Unlimited Detail really works. Dell and company are still keeping a lot of secrets and have said they’ll probably go quiet again after this one-year progress report so they can finish up their work. So, once again, you’ll have to judge for yourself.