supercomputers

Cats may retain an aura of mystery about their smug selves, but that could change with scientists using a supercomputer to simulate the the feline brain. That translates into 144 terabytes of working memory for the digital kitty mind.

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A supercomputer known as Jaguar has finally bested IBM's Roadrunner supercomputer in the biannual TOP500 list, but researchers have already begun looking into exascale supercomputers that consist of 100 million cores and run 1,000 times faster than Jaguar. Computerworld reports that the U.S. Department of Energy has begun holding workshops on the new supercomputers to run high-res climate models, develop smart grids and aid fusion energy design.

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According to Kwabena Boahen, a computer scientist at Stanford University, a robot with a processor as smart as the human brain would require at least 10 megawatts to operate. That's the amount of energy produced by a small hydroelectric plant. But a small group of computer scientists may have hit on a new neural supercomputer that could someday emulate the human brain's low energy requirements of just 20 watts--barely enough to run a dim light bulb.

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The first computer-generated model of an entire sunspot—a magnetic anomaly on the surface of the sun—tracks the magnetic fields in the area, helping researchers figure out how the sun releases energy around the spots. At the dark center, or umbra, the field is so strong—about 1,000 times the solar average—that it blocks the solar gases that typically bubble to the surface.

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In an effort to test the awesome power of their new super computer, a team of scientists at University of Tsukuba, Japan, have calculated Pi out to 2.5 trillion decimal places, more than doubling the previous record.

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In 1950, Alan Turing, the father of computer science, proposed a test for machine intelligence: Ask a human and a computer a question, and see if another person could discern the digital answer from the biological one. Now IBM engineers have devised a tougher task for Watson, their latest supercomputer: Jeopardy.

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IBM has broken its own record of computer processing speed by pushing its newest supercomputer past the petaflop barrier. The Roadrunner, a massive machine occupying 6,000 square feet of space, this week achieved a peak of 1.026 petaflops, or just over one million billion calculations per second. Just ten years ago, the fastest supercomputer in the world would have taken 20 years to finish a problem the Roadrunner is capable of finishing in a week.

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Enormous supernova explosions, gamma-ray bursts from distant galaxies, the violent birth of stars, and the incredible consequences of collisions between galaxies or black holes: These are some of the most extreme and mysterious events in the universe, yet our largest telescopes and satellites glimpse only their dim afterglow.

Thats why astronomers use the worlds largest supercomputers to transform theories and formulas into animated 3-D simulations of explosions, collapses and collisions.

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