Lifeboat Foundation

Optical tweezers manipulate tiny things like cells and nanoparticles using lasers. While they might sound like tractor beams from science fiction, the fact is their development garnered scientists a Nobel Prize in 2018.

Scientists have now used supercomputers to make optical tweezers safer to use on living cells with applications to cancer therapy, environmental monitoring, and more.

“We believe our research is one significant step closer towards the industrialization of optical tweezers in biological applications, specifically in both selective cellular surgery and targeted drug delivery,” said Pavana Kollipara, a recent graduate of The University of Texas at Austin.

The new chips were designed to be less powerful than the models sold in the US, according to sources.

NVIDIA really, really doesn’t want to lose access to China’s massive AI chip market.

NVIDIA really, really doesn’t want to lose access to China’s massive AI chip market. The company is developing three new AI chips especially for China that don’t run afoul of the latest export restrictions in the US, according to The Wall Street Journal and Reuters. Last year, the US government notified the chipmaker that it would restrict the export of computer chips meant for supercomputers and artificial intelligence applications to Russia and China due to concerns that the components could be used for military purposes. That rule prevented NVIDIA from selling certain A100 and H100 chips in the country, so it designed the A800 and H800 chips specifically for the Chinese market.

Continue reading “NVIDIA may soon announce new AI chips for China to get around US export restrictions” »

“Othello is now solved.” With that summation, a researcher at a Japanese computer company confirmed yet another milestone in supercomputing achievement.

Othello, a 140-year-old game rooted in the Shakespearean drama of the same name that depicts conflict between the Moor of Venice and Desdemona, does not seem complex at first glance. It is played on a board with black and white disks strategically positioned in squares along eight rows and eight columns.

The challenge, according to bioinformatician Hiroki Takizawa, is to conceive a game plan “with no mistake made by either player.”

A method developed at the University of Duisburg-Essen makes it possible to read data from noisy signals. Theoretical physicists and their experimental colleagues have published their findings in the current issue of Physical Review Research. The method they describe could also be significant for quantum computers.

You know it from the car radio: The weaker the signal, the more disturbing the noise. This is even more true for laboratory measurements. Researchers from the Collaborative Research Center 1,242 and the Center for Nanointegration (CENIDE) at the University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE) have now described a method for extracting data from noise.

What is a bit in a conventional computer, i.e., state 1 (current on) or state 0 (current off), is taken over in the quantum computer by the quantum bits, or qubits for short. To do this, they need defined and distinguishable states, but they can overlap at the same time and therefore enable many times the computing power of a current computer. This means they could also be used where today’s supercomputers are overtaxed, for example in searching extremely large databases.

…Such moves are helping countries like the United Kingdom to develop the expertise needed to guide AI for the public good, says Bengio. But legislation will also be needed, he says, to safeguard against the development of future AI systems that are smart and hard to control.

We are on a trajectory to build systems that are extremely useful and potentially dangerous, he says. We already ask pharma to spend a huge chunk of their money to prove that their drugs aren’t toxic. We should do the same.

Doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-03472-x

Continue reading “The world’s week on AI safety: powerful computing efforts launched to boost research” »

Training generative AI models is challenging. It requires an infrastructure that can move and process data with performance characteristics unheard of outside of traditional supercomputing environments. Nobody better understands the demands that AI puts on infrastructure than the service providers that specialize in the space.

Lambda and VAST Data have engaged in a new strategic partnership that brings the VAST Data Platform to Lambda. This follows similar announcements from CoreWeave and G42 Cloud, both of which unveiled similar relationships with VAST over the past few months. This makes VAST Data the top choice for dedicated AI service providers.

Lambda Labs and VAST Data have engaged in a new strategic partnership that brings the VAST Data Platform to Lambda Labs.

Continue reading “VAST Data Extends AI Infrastructure Leadership with Lambda Partnership” »

Chip designer Tachyum has accepted a major purchase order from a U.S. company to build a new supercomputing system for AI. This will be based on its 5 nanometre (nm) “Prodigy” Universal Processor chip, delivering more than 50 exaFLOPS of performance.

Tachyum, founded in 2016 and headquartered in Santa Clara, California, claims to have developed a disruptive, ultra-low-power processor architecture that could revolutionise data centre, AI, and high-performance computing (HPC) markets.

With the successful development of the Jiuzhang 3.0 quantum computer prototype, which makes use of 255 detected photons, China continues to hold a world-leading position in the field of quantum computer research and development, lead scientists for the program told the Global Times on Wednesday.

The research team, composed of renowned quantum physicists Pan Jianwei and Lu Chaoyang from the University of Science and Technology of China in collaboration with the Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the National Parallel Computer Engineering Technology Research Center, announced the successful construction of a 255-photon-based prototype quantum computer named Jiuzhang 3.0 early Wednesday morning.

The quantum computing feat accomplished by the team of talents achieves a speed that is 10 quadrillion times faster in solving Gaussian boson sampling (GBS) problems compared with the world’s fastest supercomputers.

Absorption spectroscopy is an analytical chemistry tool that can determine if a particular substance is present in a sample by measuring the intensity of the light absorbed as a function of wavelength. Measuring the absorbance of an atom or molecule can provide important information about electronic structure, quantum state, sample concentration, phase changes or composition changes, among other variables, including interaction with other molecules and possible technological applications.

Molecules with a high probability of simultaneously absorbing two photons of low-energy light have a wide array of applications: in molecular probes for high-resolution microscopy, as a substrate for data storage in dense three-dimensional structures, or as vectors in medicinal treatments, for example.

Studying the phenomenon by means of direct experimentation is difficult, however, and computer simulation usually complements spectroscopic characterization. Simulation also provides a microscopic view that is hard to obtain in experiments. The problem is that simulations involving relatively large molecules require several days of processing by supercomputers or months by conventional computers.