Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers have pioneered the use of parallel computing on graphics cards to simulate acoustic turbulence. This type of simulation, which previously required a supercomputer, can now be performed on a standard personal computer. The discovery will make weather forecasting models more accurate while enabling the use of turbulence theory in various fields of physics, such as astrophysics, to calculate the trajectories and propagation speeds of acoustic waves in the universe. The research was published in Physical Review Letters.

Turbulence is the complex chaotic behavior of fluids, gases or nonlinear waves in various physical systems. For example, turbulence at the ocean surface can be caused by wind or wind-drift currents, while turbulence of laser radiation in optics occurs as light is scattered by lenses. Turbulence can also occur in sound waves that propagate chaotically in certain media, such as superfluid helium.

In the 1970s, Soviet scientists proposed that turbulence occurs when sound waves deviate from equilibrium and reach large amplitudes. The theory of wave turbulence applies to many other wave systems, including magnetohydrodynamic waves in the ionospheres of stars and giant planets, and perhaps even gravitational waves in the early universe. Until recently, however, it has been nearly impossible to predict the propagation patterns of nonlinear (i.e., chaotically moving) acoustic and other waves because of the high computational complexity involved.

Astronomers have released a set of more than a million simulated images showcasing the cosmos as NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will see it. This preview will help scientists explore Roman’s myriad science goals.

“We used a supercomputer to create a synthetic universe and simulated billions of years of evolution, tracing every photon’s path all the way from each cosmic object to Roman’s detectors,” said Michael Troxel, an associate professor of physics at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who led the simulation campaign. “This is the largest, deepest, most realistic synthetic survey of a mock universe available today.”

The project, called OpenUniverse, relied on the now-retired Theta supercomputer at the DOE’s (Department of Energy’s) Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. In just nine days, the supercomputer accomplished a process that would take over 6,000 years on a typical computer.

Using a supercomputer, scientists have found that the matter of neutron stars with high isospin densities is superconducting.

In today’s AI news, this year coding might go from one of the most sought-after skills on the job market to one that can be fully automated. Mark Zuckerberg said that Meta and some of the biggest companies in the tech industry are already working toward this on an episode of the Joe Rogan Experience on Friday.

In other advancements, NovaSky, a team of researchers based out of UC Berkeley’s Sky Computing Lab, released Sky-T1-32B-Preview, a reasoning model that’s competitive with an earlier version of OpenAI’s o1. “Remarkably, Sky-T1-32B-Preview was trained for less than $450,” the team wrote in a blog post, “demonstrating that it is possible to replicate high-level reasoning capabilities affordably and efficiently.”

And, no company has capitalized on the AI revolution more dramatically than Nvidia. The world’s leading high-performance GPU maker has used its ballooning fortunes to significantly increase investments in all sorts of startups but particularly in AI startups.

Continue reading “Mark Zuckerberg Says AI Could Soon Do The Work Of Meta’s Midlevel Engineers” »

The mention of gravity and quantum in the same sentence often elicits discomfort from theoretical physicists, yet the effects of gravity on quantum information systems cannot be ignored. In a recently announced collaboration between the University of Connecticut, Google Quantum AI, and the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics (NORDITA), researchers explored the interplay of these two domains, quantifying the nontrivial effects of gravity on transmon qubits.

Led by Alexander Balatsky of UConn’s Quantum Initiative, along with Google’s Pedram Roushan and NORDITA researchers Patrick Wong and Joris Schaltegger, the study focuses on the gravitational redshift. This phenomenon slightly detunes the energy levels of qubits based on their position in a gravitational field. While negligible for a single qubit, this effect becomes measurable when scaled.

While quantum computers can effectively be protected from electromagnetic radiation, barring any innovative antigravitic devices expansive enough to hold a quantum computer, quantum technology cannot at this point in time be shielded from the effects of gravity. The team demonstrated that gravitational interactions create a universal dephasing channel, disrupting the coherence required for quantum operations. However, these same interactions could also be used to develop highly sensitive gravitational sensors.

Continue reading “Nvidia’s $3K ‘Digits’ GB10 Supercomputer” »

New Project Digits mini PC offers a petaFLOP of power for local AI processing and data science.

A breakthrough in artificial intelligence.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a branch of computer science focused on creating systems that can perform tasks typically requiring human intelligence. These tasks include understanding natural language, recognizing patterns, solving problems, and learning from experience. AI technologies use algorithms and massive amounts of data to train models that can make decisions, automate processes, and improve over time through machine learning. The applications of AI are diverse, impacting fields such as healthcare, finance, automotive, and entertainment, fundamentally changing the way we interact with technology.

Physicists turn to supercomputers to help build a 3D picture of the structures of protons and neutrons.

A team of scientists has made exciting advances in mapping the internal components of hadrons. They employed complex quantum chromodynamics and supercomputer simulations to explore how quarks and gluons interact within protons, aiming to unravel mysteries like the proton’s spin and internal energy distribution.

Unveiling the Parton Landscape.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang also announced new AI tools for creating autonomous agents during a keynote address at CES.