Entries filed under “Computing Research”

Recent purchases of D-Wave systems by NASA and Google have sparked much renewed interest in Quantum computing, but what is it really? The Economist explains.

The fundamental unit of quantum computation is the “qubit”, the quantum analogue of the ordinary “bit” in a standard machine. Like ordinary bits, qubits can take the value of 1 or 0. Unlike ordinary bits, their quantum nature also lets them exist in a strange mixture—a “superposition”, in the jargon—of both states at once, much like Erwin Schrödinger’s famous cat. That means that a quantum computer can be in many states simultaneously, which in turn means that it can, in some sense, perform many different calculations at the same time. To be precise, a quantum computer with four qubits could be in 2^4 (ie, 16) different states at a time. As you add qubits, the number of possible states rises exponentially. A 16-bit quantum machine can be in 2^16, or 65,536, states at once, while a 128-qubit device could occupy 3.4 x 10^38 different configurations, a colossal number which, if written out in longhand, would have 39 digits. Having been put into a delicate quantum state, a quantum computer can thus examine billions of possible answers simultaneously.

Read the Full Story.

We should probably note that while D-Wave systems are not really quantum computers in the classical sense, they do use quantum effects. How do they do it?  Check out this paper on Quantum Annealing with More than One Hundred Qubits.

Over at HPC for Energy, Carl Bauer writes that High Performance Computing is the key to meeting the daunting energy challenges that face the nation.

U.S. high-performance computing capabilities resident at our national laboratories can turn these challenges into an opportunity for competitive advantage. What was once only available for unique, extremely important and expensive government research projects or the largest corporations is now available to benefit society on a greater scale. Furthermore, the breadth and depth of an educated and talented work force to utilize these tools is expanding. The world-wide competitive advantage this will provide is beginning to be realized across various domestic and international industry sectors. The HPC for Energy initiative is a very important and timely program that can accelerate the realization of the benefits of better-informed deployment of HPC across all aspects of the U.S. energy supply chain.

Read the Full Story.

The 1000 bull genomes project aims to provide a large database of genetic variants for genomic prediction and genome wide association studies in all cattle breeds for the bovine research community.

Harnessing information from DNA sequences in buffalo and cattle is an important step in meeting the growing world’s demand for food. As the world’s population approaches nine billion people in 2050, the demand for food will double. Researchers are hoping new DNA variants will be identified for use in breeding programs to increase milk and meat production. Advances in DNA sequencing technologies are generating a stampede of sequence data for both the water buffalo and bovine research communities.

With help from computational experts at TACC, the researchers were able to sequence data that previously required three weeks of computing time in only 8 to 10 hours. Read the Full Story.