DOE, White House Announce Members of U.S. Quantum Advisory Committee

Technologists from the national labs, universities, federal agencies and industry have been named by the U.S. Department of Energy and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to the National Quantum Initiative Advisory Committee (NQIAC). Announced today, the NQAIC’s mission is to “counsel the Administration on ways to ensure continued American leadership […]

Google Unveils 1st Public Cloud VMs using Nvidia Ampere A100 Tensor GPUs

Google today introduced the Accelerator-Optimized VM (A2) instance family on Google Compute Engine based on the NVIDIA Ampere A100 Tensor Core GPU, launched in mid-May. Available in alpha and with up to 16 GPUs, A2 VMs are the first A100-based offering in a public cloud, according to Google. At its launch, Nvidia said the A100, built on the company’s new Ampere architecture, delivers “the greatest generational leap ever,” according to Nvidia, enhancing training and inference computing performance by 20x over its predecessors.

Quantum Superiority: How Far Away?

Some technologies, it’s said, are “always 10 years away” – we hear this in reference to autonomous vehicles and quantum computing. Of course, how far away we think they are has a lot to do with how they’re defined. Semi-autonomous cars are here today and becoming smarter with each new model year. As for quantum […]

Podcast: David Barkai book to chronicle the History of HPC

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team catches up with special guest today, David Barkai, a 50-year veteran of HPC. David has worked in a wide variety of positions at NASA, Intel, Cray, SGI and others. His current project is writing a book to chronicle the last 50 years in HPC told from the perspective of those who were there. “The main emphasis in the book is examining the good that HPC has done in the world, which is quite the story.”

Newly named Ethernet Technology Consortium Announces 800 Gigabit Ethernet Specification

The 25 Gigabit Ethernet Consortium, originally established to develop 25, 50 and 100 Gbps Ethernet specifications, announced today it has changed its name to the Ethernet Technology Consortium in order to reflect a new focus on higher-speed Ethernet technologies. “Ethernet is evolving very quickly and as a group, we felt that having 25G in the name was too constraining for the scope of the consortium,” said Brad Booth, chair of the Ethernet Technology Consortium. “We wanted to open that up so that the industry could have an organization that could enhance Ethernet specifications for new and developing markets.”

TensorFlow Quantum software combines quantum and classical machine learning

University of Waterloo students have teamed up with Google to develop software to accelerate machine learning using quantum science. The collaborative effort resulted in the creation of an open-source hybrid quantum-classical machine learning software platform, called TensorFlow Quantum. TensorFlow Quantum integrates Google’s Cirq and TensorFlow and will allow for the rapid prototyping, training, inference, and […]

Google and NASA Achieve Quantum Supremacy

Today Google officially announced that it has achieved a major computing milestone. In partnership with NASA and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the company has demonstrated the ability to compute in seconds what would take even the largest and most advanced supercomputers thousands of years, achieving a milestone known as quantum supremacy. “Achieving quantum supremacy means we’ve been able to do one thing faster, not everything faster,” said Eleanor Rieffel, co-author on the paper.

Podcast: Quantum Supremacy? Yes and No!

In this podcast, the RadioFreeHPC team discusses the Google/NASA paper, titled “Quantum Supremacy Using a Programmable Superconducting Processor”, that was published and then unpublished. “The tantalizing promise of quantum computers is that certain computational tasks might be executed exponentially faster on a quantum processor than on a classical processor. A fundamental challenge is to build a high-fidelity processor capable of running quantum algorithms in an exponentially large computational space.”

Jülich Supercomputing Centre Announces Quantum Computing Research Partnership with Google

Today the Jülich Supercomputing Centre announced it is partnering with Google in the field of quantum computing research. The partnership will include joint research and expert trainings in the fields of quantum technologies and quantum algorithms and the mutual use of quantum hardware. “The German research center will operate and make publicly accessible a European quantum computer with 50 to 100 superconducting qubits, to be developed within the EU’s Quantum Flagship Program, a large-scale initiative in the field of quantum technologies funded at the 1 billion € level on a 10 years timescale.”

Why Hardware Acceleration Is The Next Battleground In Processor Design

In this special guest feature, Theodore Omtzigt from Stillwater Supercomputing writes that as workloads specialize due to scale, hardware accelerated solutions will continue to be cheaper than approaches that utilize general purpose components. “If you’re a CIO who manages integrations of third-party hardware and software, be aware of new hardware acceleration technologies that can reduce the cost of service delivery by orders of magnitude.”