October 31, 2011
Last Friday the University of Southern California (USC) announced it was establishing a quantum computing center under the school's prestigious Viterbi School of Engineering's Information Sciences Institute. Partnering with USC will be Lockheed Martin, which will earn the company a spot in center's official name: the USC Lockheed Martin Quantum Computing Center. No word on how exactly much money was being invested by either USC or Lockheed
According to the USC press release:" "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."
Quantum computers are able to represent bits as both zero and one simultaneously, which enables such systems to perform calculations that are not feasible for classical binary computers, such as integer factorization and complex decision problems.
The notable aspect about this new USC facility is that it intends to be an operational quantum computing center; that is, it will run commercial quantum computers. Since Canadian startup D-Wave Systems is the only vendor claiming to have quantum computers, the center will employ the company's superconducting quantum computer technology to power its initial system.
Back in May, D-Wave sold its first quantum computer to Lockheed Martin, who intended to use it for their "most challenging computation problems." The system was based on the company's latest 128-qubit chip, which needs to cooled to near absolute zero (-459F) to operate. The Lockheed sale gave D-Wave a big boost to its credibility, not to mention its prospects for attracting other customers.
In the past, the company has come under scrutiny, with critics claiming the technology does not deliver true quantum computing. But a May 2011 article in Nature validated at least some of D-Wave's claims.
In any case, the USC center will give D-Wave some additional visibility, and, given the more open academic setting, a public platform to demonstrate the technology to other potential customers.
Large-scale, worldwide scientific initiatives rely on some cloud-based system to both coordinate efforts and manage computational efforts at peak times that cannot be contained within the combined in-house HPC resources. Last week at Google I/O, Brookhaven National Lab’s Sergey Panitkin discussed the role of the Google Compute Engine in providing computational support to ATLAS, a detector of high-energy particles at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Read more...
The Xeon Phi coprocessor might be the new kid on the high performance block, but out of all first-rate kickers of the Intel tires, the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) got the first real jab with its new top ten Stampede system.We talk with the center's Karl Schultz about the challenges of programming for Phi--but more specifically, the optimization...
Read more...
Although Horst Simon was named Deputy Director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, he maintains his strong ties to the scientific computing community as an editor of the TOP500 list and as an invited speaker at conferences.
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.
In this demonstration of SGI DMF ZeroWatt disk solution, Dr. Eng Lim Goh, SGI CTO, discusses a function of SGI DMF software to reduce costs and power consumption in an exascale (Big Data) storage datacenter.
The Cray CS300-AC cluster supercomputer offers energy efficient, air-cooled design based on modular, industry-standard platforms featuring the latest processor and network technologies and a wide range of datacenter cooling requirements.