Lifeboat Foundation

Posted by norm jouppi, distinguished hardware engineer, google.

Machine learning provides the underlying oomph to many of Google’s most-loved applications. In fact, more than 100 teams are currently using machine learning at Google today, from Street View, to Inbox Smart Reply, to voice search.

But one thing we know to be true at Google: great software shines brightest with great hardware underneath. That’s why we started a stealthy project at Google several years ago to see what we could accomplish with our own custom accelerators for machine learning applications.

Continue reading “Google supercharges machine learning tasks with TPU custom chip” »

New graphene transistor makes for a faster processor.

Scientists have developed a new type of graphene-based transistor and using modelling they have demonstrated that it has ultralow power consumption compared with other similar transistor devices. The findings have been published in a paper in the journal Scientific Reports. The most important effect of reducing power consumption is that it enables the clock speed of processors to be increased. According to calculations, the increase could be as high as two orders of magnitude.

“The point is not so much about saving electricity — we have plenty of electrical energy. At a lower power, electronic components heat up less, and that means that they are able to operate at a higher clock speed — not one gigahertz, but ten for example, or even one hundred,” says the corresponding author of the study, the head of MIPT’s Laboratory of Optoelectronics and Two-Dimensional Materials, Dmitry Svintsov.

So, IBM is giving grant money to A&S to build a Quantum Computer. Hmmm; so IBM announced they had a Quantum Computer and computing services via cloud. Guessing IBM has a pseudo version of QC given this move.

A physicist in the College of Arts and Sciences has been awarded a major grant to help develop quantum computing technology.

Britton Plourde, associate professor of physics, is using a three-year, $900,000 grant from IBM to conduct research for the LogiQ Program. LogiQ is part of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), based in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Continue reading “A&S Physicist Awarded IBM Grant to Develop Quantum Computing” »

QC will change many industries and even some fortunes as well. So, no wonders Canada & Australia both deem it as a priority.

Mike Lazaridis, founder of Blackberry Limited and the visionary who led the establishment of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI), the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) at the University of Waterloo and Quantum Valley Investments, delivered a keynote address highlighting the Quantum Valley model in Waterloo Region, Ontario, Canada and the emphasis both federal and provincial governments have placed on the development of quantum technologies.

The Quantum Europe conference comes at a time when large scale investments from tech companies and governments around the world, including in Canada, are being made as part of the “Second Quantum Revolution” – a new global industry fueled by the commercialization of new transformative quantum technologies.

Continue reading “QC will change many industries and even some fortunes as well” »

Australian physicists’ team has developed a new research assistant to carry out experiments in quantum mechanics in an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm form, which quickly took control of the experiment, learned the job tasks and even innovated. In a statement, co-lead researcher Paul Wigley from the Australian National University (ANU) Research School of Physics and Engineering, said he didn’t expect that the machine would be able to conduct the experiment itself from scratch within an hour.

He added that in case a simple computer program had been used, it would have taken much more time than the age of the universe to go through all the combinations and work on it.

Scientists were looking forward to reconstruct an experiment that was awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics, which included very cold gas trapped in a laser beam called a Bose-Einstein condensate.

Continue reading “AI Research Tool Runs Experiment that won 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics” »

US Navy paying D-Wave to train them on QC.

A division of the U.S. Navy intends to pay Canadian company D-Wave $11 million to learn how to use its quantum computing infrastructure, according to a federal filing posted online on Monday.

The unit seeking this training is the Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific, known as SPAWAR or SSC-PAC for short, which is headquartered in San Diego and has previously researched amphibious throwable robots, unmanned aerial vehicles, virtual reality, and many other technologies. The filing does not actually cover the cost of quantum computing hardware. But NASA has been allowing SPAWAR scientists to learn how to use the D-Wave machine that it operates with Google at the NASA Ames Research Center, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported last month.

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About ten years ago scientist Dave Bacon, now at Google, presented that a time-travelling quantum computer could rapidly solve a bunch of problems, known as NP-complete, which mathematicians have lumped together as being hard. The problem was, Bacon’s quantum computer was travelling around ‘closed timelike curves’. These are paths through the fabric of spacetime that loop back on themselves. General relativity lets such paths to exist through contortions in spacetime identified as wormholes.

Why send a message back in time, but lock it so that no one can ever read the contents? As it may be the key to resolving presently intractable problems. That’s the claim of an international collaboration.

A tool able to generate remote forces would allow us to handle dangerous or fragile materials without contact or occlusions. Acoustic levitation is a suitable technology since it can trap particles in air or water. However, no approach has tried to endow humans with an intertwined way of controlling it. Previously, the acoustic elements were static, had to surround the particles and only translation was possible. Here, we present the basic manoeuvres that can be performed when levitators are attached to our moving hands. A Gauntlet of Levitation and a Sonic Screwdriver are presented with their manoeuvres for capturing, moving, transferring and combining particles. Manoeuvres can be performed manually or assisted by a computer for repeating patterns, stabilization and enhanced accuracy or speed. The presented prototypes still have limited forces but symbolize a milestone in our expectations of future technology.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – A new highly efficient power amplifier for electronics could help make possible next-generation cell phones, low-cost collision-avoidance radar for cars and lightweight microsatellites for communications.

Fifth-generation, or 5G, mobile devices expected around 2019 will require improved power amplifiers operating at very high frequencies. The new phones will be designed to download and transmit data and videos faster than today’s phones, provide better coverage, consume less power and meet the needs of an emerging “Internet of things” in which everyday objects have network connectivity, allowing them to send and receive data.

Power amplifiers are needed to transmit signals. Because today’s cell phone amplifiers are made of gallium arsenide, they cannot be integrated into the phone’s silicon-based technology, called complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS). The new amplifier design is CMOS-based, meaning it could allow researchers to integrate the power amplifier with the phone’s electronic chip, reducing manufacturing costs and power consumption while boosting performance.

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