Posts Tagged ‘supercomputers’
Supercomputer Simulation Shows for the First Time How a Milky Way-Like Galaxy Forms
Check all galactic bulges at the door
That doubt arose from the fact that when previous, lower-resolution models were run based on that cosmological model, a huge central bulge emerged in the galaxy--a bulge that is absent from all but the center of the Milky Way (another way of saying that: there was more bulge and less disc, whereas the Milky way is more disc, less bulge). This had some physicists thinking that perhaps there was a flaw in the cosmological model itself, which seemed incapable of producing via simulation the flat, spiral-armed qualities consistent with observations of our galaxy.
But the problem wasn’t with the model, it turns out, but with the simulation of star formation. In reality, star formation happens in clusters, where dense clouds of gas feed the process of star birth in fairly tightly defined regions. But in low-resolution simulations(resolution in this sense means the ability to track individual particles), gas densities tended to spread out over relatively large areas, showing stars forming throughout the galaxy rather than in clusters. This led to a larger galactic bulge--and a less accurate picture of how Milky Way-like galaxies came into being.
To get the high resolution necessary to make the model work took a great deal of computing power, including 1.4 million processor-hours on NASA’s Pleiades supercomputer as well as additional time on supercomputers at UC Santa Barbara and the Swiss National Supercomputing Center. And at the time, the researchers had no idea if their added resolution would really make a difference.
It turns out it did. The simulated galaxy, Eris, shares the shape, bulge-to-disk ratio, star content, brightness, and various other characteristics with the Milky Way, demonstrating that the “cold dark matter” model can produce spiral-armed disc galaxies like the one we call home after all.
IBM Mysteriously Halts Work on the World’s Fastest Academic Supercomputer
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’ 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.
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IBM’s Watson Makes the Move From Answering Trivia Questions to Making Medical Diagnoses
What is...Toronto (General Hospital)?
on Jeopardy!, its massive databanks were filled with encyclopedias, novels, film scripts, and history books. These days, Watson is more into medical journals and misspelled Yahoo Answers blog posts about weird rashes and vague abdominal pains. Watson is maturing, and prepping for his first non-trivia, real-world application: medical diagnoses. He's all *sniff* grown up!
We've known medicine was to be the next step for Watson , but just recently, IBM gave a short demonstration of Watson's progress. Watson isn't the first attempt at an automated diagnosis program--we documented , and has been around for a few years--but Watson's incredible power, depth of knowledge, and ability to understand natural human language puts it in a totally different league. Diagnosing an ailment isn't really that much different from answering a trivia question; Watson takes in as much information as possible from the question, eliminating the potential answers as new information renders them impossible, and comes up with a list of likely answers. An example : "As more clues were unveiled - blurred vision, family history of arthritis, Connecticut residence - Watson's suggested diagnoses evolved from uveitis to Behcet's disease to Lyme disease. It gave the final diagnosis a 73 percent confidence rating."
While on Jeopardy!, Watson could only give one answer, but in medicine, it lists all possible answers, along with the percent likeliness. An 80% possibility of accuracy is enough for Watson to risk money on Jeopardy, but when working with possible diagnoses, that still leaves a one in five chance that the patient is afflicted with something else, so Watson is designed to divulge even the less likely answers.
Watson's human language recognition skills also allows it to input an entirely new sector of information: anecdotal evidence. Anecdotal evidence is not necessarily reliable, of course, but can still be extremely useful--it's worth noting that a patient's description of symptoms is anecdotal, and still very important to diagnosis. Watson is able to trawl through the internet, picking up the oodles of medical information out there and adding it to its memory banks. Being able to understand that, say, a "dry mouth" is the same as xerostomia can make legitimate use of all those confused forums.
Of course, Watson isn't designed to replace a doctor's diagnostic instincts. Instead, it's more like a futuristic reference book. There's simply too much information out there these days, in too many places and added too frequently, for any doctor to keep up. Watson could help keep track of all the new drugs, studies, journals, and anecdotal evidence.
Diagnosis systems using Watson are still likely a few years away, but IBM is working on ways to leverage Watson's abilities even to hospitals with budgets too small to afford a multimillion-dollar Watson of their own. iPad apps were mentioned as a distinct possibility--doctors could tap into an off-site Watson with an iPad, shoot off a few queries and receive an answer immediately. And as more medical data is digitized, Watson will only get stronger and more useful.
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How It Works: The Light-Driven Computer
New integrated circuits use photons to build fast and extremely power-efficient supercomputers
Most parts of the chip resemble those found on any other commercial chip. The parts that process or transform information—in other words, the parts that do the actual computing—still deploy electrons moving through semiconductor gates. But the interconnects, the lines that shuttle information between different areas within a chip, are drastically different. Instead of shuttling electrons, which can slow down significantly when the interconnects heat up, they shuttle light. That’s because light is easy to contain and loses less information as it travels. The researchers hope that this quick communication will make possible the first exascale computers—that is, computers that can perform a billion billion computations per second, 1,000 times as fast as today’s speediest systems.
One other benefit, says IBM engineer Will Green: The optical interconnects use significantly less power, making them cheaper to run. That’s particularly important given that supercomputers typically consume megawatts of power during operation. IBM, which has already made a working prototype, says a commercial version of the chip will debut in a supercomputer in around 2018.
Click the image above to see inside IBM's optical microchip as it turns electrical pulses into light and back again. If you are unable to view Flash files, . Illustrations by Aaron Newman; Flash Design by Josh Rashkin
More How It Works:
This month's is brought to you by Digi-Key. All posts are purely editorial content, which we are pleased to present with the help of a sponsor; the sponsor has no input in the content itself.
Department of Energy Will Use Fastest Supercomputer Ever to Design Better Batteries and Answer Cosmic Questions
IBM's 10-petaflop Mira system goes online next year
The IBM-built system, nicknamed “Mira,” will be operational at Argonne National Laboratory next year. At 10 quadrillion calculations per second, it will be twice as fast as today’s fastest supercomputer and 20 times faster than Argonne’s current model. If every person in the United States performed one calculation every second, it would take almost a year for them to do as many calculations as Mira will do in one second, according to IBM.
This kind of computing power means Mira can solve problems that were previously too big for the most powerful current supercomputers. It would take Mira two minutes to solve a problem that takes current supercomputers two years, .
Thanks to improved chip designs and an energy-efficient water-cooling system, Mira will also be one of the most energy-efficient supercomputers in the world, IBM said. It runs on IBM’s Blue Gene/Q platform and its include more than 750,000 processors and 750 terabytes of memory.
The DOE selected 16 projects to start off with, including reducing energy inefficiency in transportation and developing advanced engine designs. The system will be able to model tropical storms, battery performance and the evolution of the universe, along with other complex simulations.
IBM said Mira is a stepping stone toward exascale computing, which beats petascale computers by a factor of 1,000. Exascale computers could solve questions that have remained beyond our reach, such as understanding regional climate change and designing safe nuclear reactors.
Meanwhile, IBM is building another 10-petaflop model called Blue Waters for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's National Center for Supercomputing Applications. And Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is getting a 20-petaflop IBM model called Sequoia.
Mira will be operational in 2012 and scientists from industry, academia and government institutions will be able to use it.
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Live Tweeting Now: Ken Jennings vs. Watson, the Jeopardy!-Playing Supercomputer
Remember ? We're currently at IBM's offices watching the world's best Jeopardy-bot take on Ken Jennings, the winningest human to play the game. right now for the live blow-by-blow, and stay tuned for a full report later today.
Air Force Unveils Fastest Defense Supercomputer, Made of 1,760 PlayStation 3s
Known as the Condor Cluster, the array also packs 168 GPUs and 84 servers to direct traffic within the system, allowing all that power to work in parallel. At a total cost of about $2 million, the AFRL estimates the cluster costs something like five to 10 percent of equivalent computers built from scratch. It also consumes just 10 percent of the power.
The array employs the older model PS3s (the larger ones) because new models don’t allow the installation of Linux, a key component for turning the consoles into pliable computing hubs. The AFRL will use the Condor Cluster for quickly processing high-res satellite imagery, radar enhancement, and even research into artificial intelligence.
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