Machines Like Us – Science News

SGI and Intel Corp. are teaming up to build a supercomputer for NASA that they expect will pass the PFLOPS barrier next year and hit 10 PFLOPS by 2012. A petaflop is a quadrillion floating-point operations per second.

Three researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have proposed an innovative way to improve global climate change predictions by using a supercomputer with low-power embedded microprocessors, an approach that would overcome limitations posed by today’s conventional supercomputers.

Robert Fisher and Cal Jordan are among a team of scientists who will expend 22 million computational hours during the next year on one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, simulating an event that takes less than five seconds.

On Thursday at the International World Wide Web Conference in Beijing, two Google scientists presented a paper describing what the researchers call VisualRank, an algorithm for blending image-recognition software methods with techniques for weighting and ranking images that look most similar.

What happens when a robotic space probe breaks down millions of miles away from the nearest spacecraft engineer? If there is a software bug, engineers can sometimes correct the problem by uploading new commands, but what if the computer hardware fails?

The goal of replacing electronics with optics for processing data in computers is coming closer through cutting edge European research into the mysterious properties of “fast and slow” light. The long term aim is to boost processing speeds and data storage densities by several orders of magnitude and take the information technology industry into a new era, combining greatly improved performance with dramatically lower energy consumption.

Although the digital age is well under way, one crucial detail remains to be worked out -- how to store vast amounts of digital information in a way that allows future generations to recover it.

Using a multidisciplinary mix of geometry, biological research and techniques developed to solve problems on supercomputers, scientists at the University of California, San Diego have shown for the first time how a genome is organized in three-dimensional space.

A computer system that can carry on a discussion with a human being by reacting to signals such as tone of voice and facial expression, is being developed by an international team including Queen’s University Belfast.

Researchers have built a quantum logic gate in an optical fiber, laying the foundation for a quantum computer network.

UC San Diego computer scientists have created a fog and smoke machine for computer graphics that cuts the computational cost of making realistic smoky and foggy 3-D images, such as beams of light from a lighthouse piercing thick fog.

In a new play, Alan Turing turns to a colleague in a moment of epiphany. "Mathematics," he says triumphantly, "is a landscape riddled with holes and paradoxes. It is a chaos filled not with reasons and whys, but with contradictions and why nots."

University of Utah engineers took an early step toward building superfast computers that run on far-infrared light instead of electricity: They made the equivalent of wires that carried and bent this form of light, also known as terahertz radiation, which is the last unexploited portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Computer memory that combines the high performance and reliability of flash with the low cost and high capacity of the hard disk drive could be closer than you think, thanks to a team of IBM (NYSE: IBM) scientists.

IBM today introduced a new supercomputer powered by one of the world’s fastest microprocessors and cooled by an innovative water system.