Given the right task, AI-driven machines can be empowered with supercharged IQs that make the smartest humans look dumb, or at least inefficient. As we watch advances made in task automation, we see it burgeoning into fields previously (last week) thought unimaginable. Two recent reports underline the trend. In one, Carnegie Mellon University is teaming […]
D-Wave Demonstrates Performance Advantage in Quantum Simulation of Exotic Magnetism
February 24, 2021 by
BURNABY, British Columbia — D-Wave Systems Inc., the quantum computing systems, software and services company, has published a milestone study in collaboration with scientists at Google, demonstrating a computational performance advantage, increasing with both simulation size and problem hardness, to over 3 million times that of corresponding classical methods. Notably, this work was achieved on a practical […]
Google, Microsoft and Qualcomm Protest Nvidia-Arm Acquisition
February 12, 2021 by
On the heels of an announcement by Arm Holdings yesterday that its silicon partners in the third quarter of 2020 shipped 6.7 billion Arm-based chips, news stories from CNBC and Bloomberg report that Google, Microsoft and Qualcomm are filing complains to U.S. antitrust regulators about Nvidia’s intended acquisition of Arm from Softbank for $40 billion, […]
DOE, White House Announce Members of U.S. Quantum Advisory Committee
August 28, 2020 by
Technologists from the national labs, universities, federal agencies and industry have been named by the U.S. Department of Energy and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to the National Quantum Initiative Advisory Committee (NQIAC). Announced today, the NQAIC’s mission is to “counsel the Administration on ways to ensure continued American leadership […]
Google Unveils 1st Public Cloud VMs using Nvidia Ampere A100 Tensor GPUs
July 7, 2020 by
Google today introduced the Accelerator-Optimized VM (A2) instance family on Google Compute Engine based on the NVIDIA Ampere A100 Tensor Core GPU, launched in mid-May. Available in alpha and with up to 16 GPUs, A2 VMs are the first A100-based offering in a public cloud, according to Google. At its launch, Nvidia said the A100, built on the company’s new Ampere architecture, delivers “the greatest generational leap ever,” according to Nvidia, enhancing training and inference computing performance by 20x over its predecessors.
Quantum Superiority: How Far Away?
June 25, 2020 by
Some technologies, it’s said, are “always 10 years away” – we hear this in reference to autonomous vehicles and quantum computing. Of course, how far away we think they are has a lot to do with how they’re defined. Semi-autonomous cars are here today and becoming smarter with each new model year. As for quantum […]
Podcast: David Barkai book to chronicle the History of HPC
May 3, 2020 by
In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team catches up with special guest today, David Barkai, a 50-year veteran of HPC. David has worked in a wide variety of positions at NASA, Intel, Cray, SGI and others. His current project is writing a book to chronicle the last 50 years in HPC told from the perspective of those who were there. “The main emphasis in the book is examining the good that HPC has done in the world, which is quite the story.”
Newly named Ethernet Technology Consortium Announces 800 Gigabit Ethernet Specification
April 7, 2020 by
The 25 Gigabit Ethernet Consortium, originally established to develop 25, 50 and 100 Gbps Ethernet specifications, announced today it has changed its name to the Ethernet Technology Consortium in order to reflect a new focus on higher-speed Ethernet technologies. “Ethernet is evolving very quickly and as a group, we felt that having 25G in the name was too constraining for the scope of the consortium,” said Brad Booth, chair of the Ethernet Technology Consortium. “We wanted to open that up so that the industry could have an organization that could enhance Ethernet specifications for new and developing markets.”
TensorFlow Quantum software combines quantum and classical machine learning
March 9, 2020 by
University of Waterloo students have teamed up with Google to develop software to accelerate machine learning using quantum science. The collaborative effort resulted in the creation of an open-source hybrid quantum-classical machine learning software platform, called TensorFlow Quantum. TensorFlow Quantum integrates Google’s Cirq and TensorFlow and will allow for the rapid prototyping, training, inference, and […]
Google and NASA Achieve Quantum Supremacy
October 23, 2019 by
Today Google officially announced that it has achieved a major computing milestone. In partnership with NASA and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the company has demonstrated the ability to compute in seconds what would take even the largest and most advanced supercomputers thousands of years, achieving a milestone known as quantum supremacy. “Achieving quantum supremacy means we’ve been able to do one thing faster, not everything faster,” said Eleanor Rieffel, co-author on the paper.
