super computer
Latest
IBM preparing to launch a Watson cloud service, lease out APIs to developers
Need a little help from a supercomputer? You just might get it: IBM is getting ready to release a more powerful version of its Watson supercomputer, and it'll be available for rent. According to the PC World, the company is working on a Watson-based cloud service that developers can use to build richer, more interactive applications. The project uses a smaller, more scaleable version of Watson to build cognitive supercomputers as needed -- potentially leaving a smaller footprint. IBM is already working with partners to kick the service off, specifically Fluid, who is creating a Watson-powered retail assistant that's said to actively converse with customers to help them make "more informed buying decisions." Developers familiar with RESTful APIs shouldn't have too much trouble using Watson, IBM's Rob High told the PC World, although it won't be exactly like traditional programming. "Cognitive systems are different in that they have the ability to simulate human behavior. For the most part humans have had to adapt to the computer. As we get into cognitive systems we open up the aperture to the computer adapting to the human." IBM has yet to specifics on when the Watson-powered cloud will be available, or how much it'll cost developers to work with the Jeopardy star. Hopefully, the cognitive computer will still be able to put together a tasty pastry.
Cray's Jaguar supercomputer upgraded with NVIDIA Tesla GPUs, renamed Titan
Cray's Jaguar (or XK7) supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has been loaded up with the first shipping NVIDIA Tesla K20 GPUs and renamed Titan. Loaded with 18,688 of the Kepler-based K20s, Titan's peak performance is more than 20 petaflops. Sure, the machine has an equal number of 16-core AMD Opteron 6274 processors as it does GPUs, but the Tesla hardware packs 90 percent of the entire processing punch. Titan is roughly ten times faster and five times more energy efficient than it was before the name change, yet it fits into the same 200 cabinets as its predecessor. Now that it's complete, the rig will analyze data and create simulations for scientific projects ranging from topics including climate change to nuclear energy. The hardware behind Titan isn't meant to power your gaming sessions, but the NVIDIA says lessons learned from supercomputer GPU development trickle back down to consumer-grade cards. For the full lowdown on the beefed-up supercomputer, hit the jump for a pair of press releases.
Alt-week 10.6.12: supercomputers on the moon, hear the Earth sing and the future of sports commentary
Alt-week peels back the covers on some of the more curious sci-tech stories from the last seven days. Normally we try to encourage you to join us around the warm alt-week campfire by teasing you about what diverse and exotic internet nuggets we have for you inside. Sadly, this week that's not the case. There's nothing for you here we're afraid. Not unless you like totally mind-blowing space videos, singing planets and AI / sports commentary-flavored cocktails, that is. Oh, you do? Well what do you know! Come on in... this is alt-week.
Cha-ching! IBM's Watson heads to Citigroup to meddle in human finances
Watson's been a busy supercomputer since it took a couple of humans to school on Jeopardy last year -- what with its stint at Columbia and a recent foray into hunting patent trolls -- and now it's taking on the financial industry. IBM and Citigroup recently announced plans to explore how America's favorite supercomputer fits into the realm of digital banking. Under the agreement, Citi will examine Watson's ability to "help analyze customer needs and process vast amounts of up-to-the-minute financial, economic, product and client data," in the hopes of providing rapid, personalized banking solutions. According to Bloomberg, Watson's financial assistance will be provided as a "cloud-based service" and will earn IBM a portion of the revenue and savings it helps generate. The full press release (which makes no mention of a vacation for the overworked machine) can be found after the break.
NVIDIA's Tesla GPU powers Tsubame 2.0 to green supercomputer supremacy
The Green500 might not be quite as well known as the Top500, but it's no less of an honor to be counted among the world's most energy efficient supercomputers. NVIDIA is tooting its own horn for making it on to the list for the second year in a row as part of the "greenest" petaflop machine. The Tsubame 2.0 at the Tokyo Institute of Technology's Global Scientific Information Center is powered by Intel's Xeon CPUs, but NVIDIA's Tesla general purpose GPUs do a vast majority of the number crunching, allowing it to deliver 1.19 petaflops of performance while consuming only 1.2 megawatts. That's roughly 958 megaflops per watt, a huge increase over the most efficient CPU-only super computer, the Cielo Cray, which gets only 278 megaflops per watt. The Tsubame 2.0 isn't the greenest machine on the planet though, that honor belongs to IBM's BlueGene which takes the top five spots on the Green500. Still, number ten ain't bad... right? Check out the PR after the break.
China debuts homegrown supercomputer, hits one petaflop mark
China has already, however briefly, sat atop the Top500 list of supercomputers, but that was using silicon designed by American companies like Intel and NVIDIA. The country's latest contestant though, is sure to be a much bigger point of national pride. The Sunway BlueLight MPP, which was installed at the National Supercomputer Center in Jinan this September, is powered by 8,700 ShenWei SW1600 CPUs -- the homegrown chips that come out of Shanghai. The Sunway's one petaflop performance isn't enough to make it the new king of the hill, but it should get it into the top 20. More impressively, the machine only consumes about one megawatt of electricity -- roughly a quarter of the 2.5 petaflop Tianhe-1A. Now it's up to researchers to crank these ShenWei cores up to a 11 and make a run at that 50 petaflop Cray.
IBM and NCSA end their Blue Waters affair, go back to just being supercomputing friends
It seems that IBM and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois have hit a snag in their once fruitful relationship. After nearly four years of partnering for the Blue Waters petascale supercomputer, the NCSA's recently released a joint statement explaining that IBM's "terminated" its involvement with the project. If you'll recall, IBM was supplying its latest Power7 rigs to get all that data flowing, but the company's now decided that Ol' Blue will require more resources than initially anticipated. Apparently, there were talks to try and keep the spark alive, but since those fell through both have decided to return each others CDs and hoodies assets involved with the project (per contract terms): IBM gives back the money, while the NCSA returns any hardware supplied. The two plan on remaining in touch for future endeavours, and the NCSA doesn't appear to be too down either as it'll be consulting with the National Science Foundation to keep Blue Waters afloat. You'll find the official statement in the source link below, but we've included a video rendition of how we'd like to imagine it past the break. [Photo credit: kosheahan]
Inhabitat's Week in Green: of mirror cubes and urban icebergs
Each week our friends at Inhabitat recap the week's most interesting green developments and clean tech news for us -- it's the Week in Green. With summer in full swing, this week Inhabitat watched the mercury rise as the world's largest thermostat burst forth with an array of 72,000 building-mounted LEDs. We also kept things cool with a remarkable plan to transform frozen construction sites into event-hosting urban icebergs. And if you haven't made plans for a summer vacation yet, might we recommend this stunning Swedish "Treehotel" housed within a silvery mirror cube in the sky? Heartening news rang forth from the renewable energy sector this week as a UN-backed study reported that the building of new renewable energy plants has officially overtaken fossil fuel plants in Europe and the US. We also took a look at two brand new types of power plants -- the world's first hydrogen-driven power plant in Italy and the first hybrid coal-solar power plant in Colorado. The past week also saw several remarkable advances in clean tech, starting with MIT's latest innovation, a new type of high-tech fiber that can transmit sound, light, and generate electricity. We also paid homage to one of our all-time favorite sources of (surprisingly green) home entertainment - the Roku Box.
World of Warcraft and The9 make China's top ranked supercomputers list
Real-life scientists recently overran World of Warcraft and wrapped their brains around trogs and intracellular signaling. One mind trip from the mad scientist James Wallis intrigued us with his experimental astronomical calculations in Azeroth. However, there is another real science underneath the brilliant theory-crafting bringing these worlds to life and players across the Globe and that is the computer infrastructure. One entity responsible for this science is the The9, a leading MMORPG operator and developer in the Chinese market, and with over 5.5 million World of Warcraft subscribers that's going to take a lot of computer power to feed the PC baang frenzy. According to the UK edition of The Register, The9 ranked on China's Top 100 supercomputer list taking half the top ten spots with 12 machines overall in the top 100. The 1950–core clusters taking the top spots were built by HP, and when taking all 12 machines into account The9 has a least 18,032 cores of processing power dedicated to keeping MMOG players all across China fixated on: World of Warcraft, Soul Ultimate Nation, Granado Espada, and Joyful Journey West.
Britain's new fastest supercomputer makes its ominous debut
It's always tough to keep track of the fastest supercomputers around at any given moment, but according to Reuters, the rather imposing block of machines pictured above is now at the top of the heap in Britain, and at least near the top in all of Europe. Dubbed HECToR (for High-End Computing Terascale Resource), the Cray-built rig packs the equivalent power of 12,000 desktop PCs, or enough to perform some 63 million calculations per second, which'll apparently be used to study everything from climate change to new medicines -- or, as the researchers responsible for the computer put it, "push forward the boundaries of knowledge." In related news, Engadget's Folding@home team is still accepting new members -- nudge nudge, British friends.[Thanks, Matt]
The bicycle-powered supercomputer
In an attempt to illustrate the low power requirements of its latest Linux-based supercomputer, a company called SiCortex put together a demonstration showing the massive number-cruncher performing billions of calculations per-second while a team of between eight to ten bicyclists pedaled to keep it going. The NextFest presentation was a ploy to showcase the small power consumption of the new machine, and to point out that energy conservation for both system power and cooling are major issues facing manufacturers and end-users. As the custom Trek bikes churned out 260-watts of power each, Dr. John Mucci -- the company's CEO -- said, "Ten years ago, this analysis was impossible on even the biggest computers, and now it's being done on a bicycle powered machine," then added, "Ten years from now, we'll probably be doing it right down at the docks as they unload the ships." Which sounds kind of weird, but isn't.[Via I4U]
Spinnaker project mimics human brain
Scientists have been on the hunt for years attempting to model the human brain, but typically any research in this area was strictly used for medical purposes. Steve Furber of the University of Manchester is the head honcho of the Spinnaker (short for spiking neural network architecture) project, which seeks to better understand the complex interactions of brain cells in hopes of creating more "fault-tolerant computers." Furber states that although we lose one neuron per second during our adult life (just think, you've already lost a couple dozen reading this post), yet our brains don't suffer any catastrophic meltdowns or periods of underperformance because of it. Rather, the brain has an impeccable ability to disregard malfunctions and find alternate ways to function without throwing a theoretical BSOD. The Spinnaker computer consists of silicon chips containing 20 microprocessors, 19 of which will behave as neurons while the remaining processor records the activities. Each chip will replicate about 20,000 human neurons, and unlike normal processors, Furber's approach will eliminate the "clocks" that typically synchronize the processes, providing a much more accurate representation of how biological neurons somehow keep on ticking (so to speak). The Spinnaker project is hoping to reach a functioning system containing 50 chips and a thousand processors within two years, and although we don't claim to be experts on the subject, it sounds like they should take a peek at how those self-healing chips are coming along, eh?[Thanks, Ian]
