October 28, 2011
MARINA DEL REY, Calif., Oct. 28 -- USC, Lockheed Martin, Inc. and D-Wave Systems, Inc. will officially unveil the first commercial and operational quantum computer academic center at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering's Information Sciences Institute on Friday, October 28, at 10:00 A.M.
Speaking about the new center will be Dr. Ray Johnson, CTO, Lockheed Martin; Dr. Daniel Lidar, Director, USC-Lockheed Martin Quantum Computing Center, Dr. Geordie Rose, Founder and CTO, D-Wave; and Vern Brownell, President and CEO, D-Wave
Continuing its rich history with pioneering advances in high-performance computing and the Internet, USC is now exploring the promising future of quantum computing. Invoking superconducting technology, USC has constructed a high-fidelity computing center to house D-Wave's revolutionary quantum computing chip, recently purchased by Lockheed Martin and provided to USC for its applicability to information technology. USC and Lockheed Martin will work synergistically to explore the potential of the chip, which is at the cutting edge of technological advances.
The D-Wave chip has 128 quantum bits (or "qubits") which have the capability of encoding the two digits of one and zero at the same time -- as opposed to traditional bits, which distinctly encode either a one or a zero. This property, called "superposition," will allow quantum computing systems to perform complicated calculations exponentially faster than traditional computers.
With the construction of the multi-million dollar quantum computing center, USC now has the infrastructure in place to support future generations of quantum computer chips, positioning the school and its partners at the forefront of quantum computing research.
"The USC Lockheed Martin Quantum Computing Center will open new windows into the fascinating world of quantum computing," said USC Viterbi Dean Yannis C. Yortsos. "It will help advance our understanding of the potential of this new technology and provide a new paradigm in the quest for faster and more secure computing."
About the Viterbi School of Engineering
Engineering Studies began at the University of Southern California in 1905. Nearly a century later, the Viterbi School of Engineering received a naming gift in 2004 from alumnus Andrew J. Viterbi, inventor of the Viterbi algorithm now key to cell phone technology and numerous data applications. Consistently ranked among the top graduate programs in the world, the school enrolls more than 2,100 undergraduate students and 4,200 graduate students, taught by 168 tenured and tenure-track faculty, with 50 endowed chairs and professorships. For more information, visit http://viterbi.usc.edu.
-----
Source: USC Viterbi School of Engineering
Contributing commentator, Andrew Jones, offers a break in the news cycle with an assessment of what the national "size matters" contest means for the U.S. and other nations...
Read more...
Today at the International Supercomputing Conference in Leipzing, Germany, Jack Dongarra presented on a proposed benchmark that could carry a bit more weight than its older Linpack companion. The high performance conjugate gradient (HPCG) concept takes into account new architectures for new applications, while shedding the floating point....
Read more...
Not content to let the Tianhe-2 announcement ride alone, Intel rolled out a series of announcements around its Knights Corner and Xeon Phi products--all of which are aimed at adding some options and variety for a wider base of potential users across the HPC spectrum. Today at the International Supercomputing Conference, the company's Raj....
Read more...
Jun 18, 2013 |
The world's largest supercomputers, like Tianhe-2, are great at traditional, compute-intensive HPC workloads, such as simulating atomic decay or modeling tornados. But data-intensive applications--such as mining big data sets for connections--is a different sort of workload, and runs best on a different sort of computer.
Read more...
Jun 18, 2013 |
Researchers are finding innovative uses for Gordon, the 285 teraflop supercomputer housed at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) that has a unique Flash-based storage system. Since going online, researchers have put the incredibly fast I/O to use on a wide variety of workloads, ranging from chemistry to political science.
Read more...
Jun 17, 2013 |
The advent of low-power mobile processors and cloud delivery models is changing the economics of computing. But just as an economy car is good at different things than a full size truck, an HPC workload still has certain computing demands that neither the fastest smartphone nor the most elastic cloud cluster can fulfill.
Read more...
Jun 14, 2013 |
For all the progress we've made in IT over the last 50 years, there's one area of life that has steadfastly eluded the grasp of computers: understanding human language. Now, researchers at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) are utilizing a Hadoop cluster on its Longhorn supercomputer to move the state of the art of language processing a little bit further.
Read more...
Jun 13, 2013 |
Titan, the Cray XK7 at the Oak Ridge National Lab that debuted last fall as the fastest supercomputer in the world with 17.59 petaflops of sustained computing power, will rely on its previous LINPACK test for the upcoming edition of the Top 500 list.
Read more...
05/10/2013 | Cleversafe, Cray, DDN, NetApp, & Panasas | From Wall Street to Hollywood, drug discovery to homeland security, companies and organizations of all sizes and stripes are coming face to face with the challenges – and opportunities – afforded by Big Data. Before anyone can utilize these extraordinary data repositories, however, they must first harness and manage their data stores, and do so utilizing technologies that underscore affordability, security, and scalability.
04/15/2013 | Bull | “50% of HPC users say their largest jobs scale to 120 cores or less.” How about yours? Are your codes ready to take advantage of today’s and tomorrow’s ultra-parallel HPC systems? Download this White Paper by Analysts Intersect360 Research to see what Bull and Intel’s Center for Excellence in Parallel Programming can do for your codes.
Join HPCwire Editor Nicole Hemsoth and Dr. David Bader from Georgia Tech as they take center stage on opening night at Atlanta's first Big Data Kick Off Week, filmed in front of a live audience. Nicole and David look at the evolution of HPC, today's big data challenges, discuss real world solutions, and reveal their predictions. Exactly what does the future holds for HPC?
Join our webinar to learn how IT managers can migrate to a more resilient, flexible and scalable solution that grows with the data center. Mellanox VMS is future-proof, efficient and brings significant CAPEX and OPEX savings. The VMS is available today.