Increasing its HPL score from 1.02 Eflop/s in November 2022 to an impressive 1.194 Eflop/s on this list, Frontier was able to improve upon its score after a stagnation between June 2022 and November 2022. Considering exascale was only a goal to aspire to just a few years ago, a roughly 17% increase here is an enormous success. Additionally, Frontier earned a score of 9.95 Eflop/s on the HLP-MxP benchmark, which measures performance for mixed-precision calculation. This is also an increase over the 7.94 EFlop/s that the system achieved on the previous list and nearly 10 times more powerful than the machine's HPL score. Frontier is based on the HPE Cray EX235a architecture and utilizes AMD EPYC 64C 2 GHz processors. It also has 8,699,904 cores and an incredible energy efficiency rating of 52.59 Gflops/watt. It also relies on gigabit ethernet for data transfer.

Applied Materials, Inc. today announced a landmark investment to build the world's largest and most advanced facility for collaborative semiconductor process technology and manufacturing equipment research and development (R&D). The new Equipment and Process Innovation and Commercialization (EPIC) Center is planned as the heart of a high-velocity innovation platform designed to accelerate development and commercialization of the foundational technologies needed by the global semiconductor and computing industries.

To be located at an Applied campus in Silicon Valley, the multibillion-dollar facility is designed to provide a breadth and scale of capabilities that is unique in the industry, including more than 180,000 square feet - more than three American football fields - of state-of-the-art cleanroom for collaborative innovation with chipmakers, universities and ecosystem partners. Designed from the ground up to accelerate the pace of introducing new manufacturing innovations, the new EPIC Center is expected to reduce the time it takes the industry to bring a technology from concept to commercialization by several years, while simultaneously increasing the commercial success rate of new innovations and the return on R&D investments for the entire semiconductor ecosystem.

NVIDIA today announced a supercomputer built on the NVIDIA Grace CPU Superchip, adding to a wave of new energy-efficient supercomputers based on the Arm Neoverse platform. The Isambard 3 supercomputer to be based at the Bristol & Bath Science Park, in the U.K., will feature 384 Arm-based NVIDIA Grace CPU Superchips to power medical and scientific research, and is expected to deliver 6x the performance and energy efficiency of Isambard 2, placing it among Europe's most energy-efficient systems.

It will achieve about 2.7 petaflops of FP64 peak performance and consume less than 270 kilowatts of power, ranking it among the world's three greenest non-accelerated supercomputers. The project is being led by the University of Bristol, as part of the research consortium the GW4 Alliance, together with the universities of Bath, Cardiff and Exeter.

Quantinuum is proud and excited to announce this significant step towards fault tolerant quantum computing. This achievement has been uniquely enabled by the release of Quantinuum's System Model H2 - the highest performing quantum computer ever built. The official launch of Quantinuum's H2 quantum processor, Powered by Honeywell, follows extensive pre-launch work with a variety of global partners and was essential to the controlled creation and manipulation of non-Abelian anyons. The precise control of non-Abelian anyons has been long held as the path to using topological qubits for a fault tolerant quantum computer.

Tony Uttley, President and COO of Quantinuum, stated "With our second-generation system, we are entering a new phase of quantum computing. H2 highlights the opportunity to achieve valuable outcomes that are only possible with a quantum computer. The development of the H2 processor is also a critical step in moving towards universal fault tolerant quantum computing." He added "This demonstration is a beautiful proof point in the power of our H-Series hardware roadmap and reinforces our primary purpose which is to enable our customers to tackle problems that were previously beyond the reach of classical computers. The implications for society are significant and we are excited to see how this technology truly changes the world."

The Biden-Harris Administration through the U.S. Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology today launched the first CHIPS for America funding opportunity for manufacturing incentives to restore U.S. leadership in semiconductor manufacturing, support good-paying jobs across the semiconductor supply chain, and advance U.S. economic and national security.

As part of the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act, the Department of Commerce is overseeing $50 billion to revitalize the U.S. semiconductor industry, including $39 billion in semiconductor incentives. The first funding opportunity seeks applications for projects to construct, expand, or modernize commercial facilities for the production of leading-edge, current-generation, and mature-node semiconductors. This includes both front-end wafer fabrication and back-end packaging. The Department will also be releasing a funding opportunity for semiconductor materials and equipment facilities in the late spring, and one for research and development facilities in the fall.

IonQ, Inc. (NYSE: IONQ), an industry leader in quantum computing, today announced plans to open the first known dedicated quantum computing manufacturing facility in the U.S., located in the suburbs of Seattle, Washington. The new facility will house IonQ's growing R&D and manufacturing teams, as they develop systems to meet continued customer demand. With public support from U.S. Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) - an early proponent of the CHIPS and Science Act - and Congresswoman Suzan DelBene, US representative from Washington's 1st congressional district,today's announcement is part of IonQ's broader intent to invest $1 billion through expansion in the Pacific Northwest over the next 10 years.

"IonQ making the decision to open the first ever quantum computing manufacturing facility in the country right here in Bothell is a very big deal—and it's great news for Washington state," said Senator Murray. "Opening this facility will absolutely help ensure Washington state continues to be a leader in innovation and cutting-edge technologies—but it also means jobs that will be an investment in our families and their futures. These are the kinds of investments that happen when we pass legislation like the CHIPS and Science Act to invest in American manufacturing and build the economy of the future right here at home."

ASUS, the leading IT company in server systems, server motherboards and workstations, today announced its presence at NVIDIA GTC - a developer conference for the era of AI and the metaverse. ASUS will focus on three demonstrations outlining its strategic developments in AI, including: the methodology behind ASUS MLPerf Training v2.0 results that achieved multiple breakthrough records; a success story exploring the building of an academic AI data center at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia; and a research AI data center created in conjunction with the National Health Research Institute in Taiwan.

MLPerf benchmark results help advance machine-learning performance and efficiency, allowing researchers to evaluate the efficacy of AI training and inference based on specific server configurations. Since joining MLCommons in 2021, ASUS has gained multiple breakthrough records in the data center closed division across six AI-benchmark tasks in AI training and inferencing MLPerf Training v2.0. At the ASUS GTC session, senior ASUS software engineers will share the methodology for achieving these world-class results—as well as the company's efforts to deliver more efficient AI workflows through machine learning.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPE) today announced its ongoing commitment in Europe by building its first factory in the region for next-generation high performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) systems to accelerate delivery to customers and strengthen the region's supplier ecosystem. The new site will manufacture HPE's industry-leading systems as custom-designed solutions to advance scientific research, mature AL/ML initiatives, and bolster innovation.

The dedicated HPC factory, which will become the fourth of HPE's global HPC sites, will be located in Kutná Hora, Czech Republic, next to HPE's existing European site for manufacturing its industry-standard servers and storage solutions. Operations will begin in summer 2022.

Fujitsu has successfully developed the world's fastest quantum computer simulator capable of handling 36 qubit quantum circuits on a cluster system featuring Fujitsu's "FUJITSU Supercomputer PRIMEHPC FX 700" ("PRIMEHPC FX 700")(1), which is equipped with the same A64FX CPU that powers the world's fastest supercomputer, Fugaku.

The newly developed quantum simulator can execute the quantum simulator software "Qulacs"(3) in parallel at high speed, achieving approximately double the performance of other significant quantum simulators in 36 qubit quantum operations. Fujitsu's new quantum simulator will serve as an important bridge towards the development of quantum computing applications that are expected to be put to practical use in the years ahead.

The first molecular electronics chip has been developed, realizing a 50-year-old goal of integrating single molecules into circuits to achieve the ultimate scaling limits of Moore's Law. Developed by Roswell Biotechnologies and a multi-disciplinary team of leading academic scientists, the chip uses single molecules as universal sensor elements in a circuit to create a programmable biosensor with real-time, single-molecule sensitivity and unlimited scalability in sensor pixel density. This innovation, appearing this week in a peer-reviewed article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), will power advances in diverse fields that are fundamentally based on observing molecular interactions, including drug discovery, diagnostics, DNA sequencing, and proteomics.

"Biology works by single molecules talking to each other, but our existing measurement methods cannot detect this," said co-author Jim Tour, PhD, a Rice University chemistry professor and a pioneer in the field of molecular electronics. "The sensors demonstrated in this paper for the first time let us listen in on these molecular communications, enabling a new and powerful view of biological information."

Much of the technology industry in Taiwan is located in various science parks located around the island and the three largest scientific parks in Taiwan raked home US$127 billion in sales last year, or an increase of 23.58 percent compared to 2020. The semiconductor industry accounted for nearly 72 percent of that, although, the fact that the three largest science parks are home to companies like TSMC, UMC, MediaTek, Kingston, Realtek, AU Optronics, Winbond, Innolux and many others, so it's not surprising that the largest share of revenue is coming from here. It should be noted that the 72 percent figure is only for the first three quarters of 2021, so it might end up being even higher.

The numbers are based on data from the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) and after semiconductors, optoelectronics were bringing in the highest revenue streams with an increase of over 29 percent compared to 2020, to a sales value of almost US$18 billion, which is truly dwarfed when compared to the semiconductor sales. In third place was sales of computers and computer accessories which accounted for a comparatively measly US$4.78 billion, or an increase of 13.53 percent. The trend is expected to continue in 2022, assuming Taiwan isn't affected by the pandemic.

The 58th annual edition of the TOP500 saw little change in the Top10. The Microsoft Azure system called Voyager-EUS2 was the only machine to shake up the top spots, claiming No. 10. Based on an AMD EPYC processor with 48 cores and 2.45GHz working together with an NVIDIA A100 GPU and 80 GB of memory, Voyager-EUS2 also utilizes a Mellanox HDR Infiniband for data transfer.

While there were no other changes to the positions of the systems in the Top10, Perlmutter at NERSC improved its performance to 70.9 Pflop/s. Housed at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Perlmutter's increased performance couldn't move it from its previously held No. 5 spot.

Over the past couple of years there has been a huge increase in ransomware attacks, and now scientists claim to have a solution that could help protect SSDs from getting encrypted by ransomware. The SSD-Insider++, as the solution has been named, claims to be able to detect ransomware activity and reverse the encryption on the fly.

SSD-Insider++ was developed by a group of engineers from South Korea's Inha University, Daegu Institute of Science and Technology, and the Cyber Security Department at Ewha Womans University (EWU), as well as a researcher from the University of Central Florida in the US. It's a firmware level based protection that looks for patterns of ransomware activity on the drive and stops it before any damage has been done.

AMD announced that the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory (Argonne) has chosen AMD EPYC processors to power a new supercomputer, called Polaris, which will prepare researchers for the forthcoming exascale supercomputer at Argonne called Aurora. Polaris is built by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), will use 2nd Gen EPYC processors and then upgrade to 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors, and will allow scientists and developers to test and optimize software codes and applications to tackle a range of AI, engineering, and scientific projects.

"AMD EPYC server processors continue to be the leading choice for modern HPC research, delivering the performance and capabilities needed to help solve the complex problems that pre-exascale and exascale computing will address," said Forrest Norrod, senior vice president and general manager, Datacenter and Embedded Solutions Business Group, AMD. "We are extremely proud to support Argonne National Laboratory and their critical research into areas including low carbon technologies, medical research, astronomy, solar power and more as we draw closer to the exascale era."

NVIDIA today introduced a new class of NVIDIA-Certified Systems, bringing AI within reach for organizations that run their applications on industry-standard enterprise data center infrastructure. These include high-volume enterprise servers from top manufacturers, which were announced in January and are now certified to run the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software suite—which is exclusively certified for VMware vSphere 7, the world's most widely used compute virtualization platform.

Further expanding the NVIDIA-Certified servers ecosystem is a new wave of systems featuring the NVIDIA A30 GPU for mainstream AI and data analytics and the NVIDIA A10 GPU for AI-enabled graphics, virtual workstations and mixed compute and graphics workloads, also announced today.

NVIDIA today announced that it is building the United Kingdom's most powerful supercomputer, which it will make available to U.K. healthcare researchers using AI to solve pressing medical challenges, including those presented by COVID-19.

Expected to come online by year end, the "Cambridge-1" supercomputer will be an NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD system capable of delivering more than 400 petaflops of AI performance and 8 petaflops of Linpack performance, which would rank it No. 29 on the latest TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers. It will also rank among the world's top 3 most energy-efficient supercomputers on the current Green500 list.

Intel today announced that it is among the leading U.S. quantum technology companies included in Q-NEXT, one of five new national quantum research centers established by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Q-NEXT, National Quantum Information Science Research Center, is led by Argonne National Laboratory and brings together world-class researchers from national laboratories, universities and leading technology companies to ensure U.S. scientific and economic leadership in this advancing field. The collaboration will enable Intel to actively contribute to the industry's efforts on quantum computing.

"Advancing quantum practicality will be a team sport across the ecosystem, and our partnership with Argonne National Laboratory on Q-NEXT will enable us to bring our unique areas of expertise to this cross-industry effort to drive meaningful progress in the field. At Intel, we are taking a broad view of quantum research that spans hardware and software with a singular focus on getting quantum out of labs and into the real world, where it can solve real problems," said James Clarke, director of Quantum Hardware at Intel.

Researchers at the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT) have unveiled the discovery of a new material, called amorphous boron nitride (a-BN), in collaboration with Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) and the University of Cambridge. Published in the journal Nature, the study has the potential to accelerate the advent of the next generation of semiconductors.

Recently, SAIT has been working on the research and development of two-dimensional (2D) materials - crystalline materials with a single layer of atoms. Specifically, the institute has been working on the research and development of graphene, and has achieved groundbreaking research outcomes in this area such as the development of a new graphene transistor as well as a novel method of producing large-area, single-crystal wafer-scale graphene. In addition to researching and developing graphene, SAIT has been working to accelerate the material's commercialization.

AMD and technology partner Penguin Computing Inc., a division of SMART Global Holdings, Inc, today announced that New York University (NYU), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Rice University are the first universities named to receive complete AMD-powered, high-performance computing systems from the AMD HPC Fund for COVID-19 research. AMD also announced it will contribute a cloud-based system powered by AMD EPYC and AMD Radeon Instinct processors located on-site at Penguin Computing, providing remote supercomputing capabilities for selected researchers around the world. Combined, the donated systems will collectively provide researchers with more than seven petaflops of compute power that can be applied to fight COVID-19.

"High performance computing technology plays a critical role in modern viral research, deepening our understanding of how specific viruses work and ultimately accelerating the development of potential therapeutics and vaccines," said Lisa Su, president and CEO, AMD. "AMD and our technology partners are proud to provide researchers around the world with these new systems that will increase the computing capability available to fight COVID-19 and support future medical research."

Today, "Nature" published a research paper on the next generation of logic devices authored by researchers from Intel, the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The paper describes a magneto-electric spin-orbit (MESO) logic device, invented by Intel. MESO devices have the potential to lower voltage by 5 times and energy by 10-30 times when combined with ultralow sleep state power, as compared to today's complementary metal-oxide-semiconductors (CMOS). While Intel is pursuing CMOS scaling, the company has been working on computing logic options that will emerge in the next decade for the beyond-CMOS era, driving computing energy-efficiency and allowing performance to grow across diverse computing architectures.

"We are looking for revolutionary, not evolutionary, approaches for computing in the beyond-CMOS era. MESO is built around low-voltage interconnects and low-voltage magneto-electrics. It brings together quantum materials innovation with computing. We are excited about the progress we have made and are looking forward to future demonstrations of reducing the switching voltage even further toward its potential," said Ian Young, Intel Senior Fellow and director of the Exploratory Integrated Circuits group in the Technology and Manufacturing Group.

DARPA seems to be taking to heart engineer and cyber-security experts' opinions that hardware-based security would be the best security. The Defense Advanced Research Agency (DARPA), which has appeared in every other sci-fi war movie, has started its System Security Integrated through Hardware and Firmware (SSITH) program, with an initial kick worth $3.6 million to the University of Michigan. The objective? To develop "unhackable" systems, with hardware-based security solutions that become impervious to most software exploits.

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) of the University of Michigan Professor Todd Austin, lead researcher on the project, says his team's approach, currently code-named Morpheus, achieves hack-proof hardware by "changing the internal codes once a second". Austin likens Morpheus' defenses to requiring a would-be attacker to solve a new Rubik's Cube every second to crack the chip's security. In this way, the architecture should provide the maximum possible protection against intrusions, including hacks that exploit zero-day vulnerabilities, or those that cybersecurity experts have yet to discover. Morpheus thereby provides a future-proof solution, Austin said. "This race against ever more clever cyberintruders is never going to end if we keep designing our systems around gullible hardware that can be fooled in countless ways by software," SSITH program manager Linton Salmon of the Agency's Microsystems Technology Office.

The fiftieth TOP500 list of the fastest supercomputers in the world has China overtaking the US in the total number of ranked systems by a margin of 202 to 143. It is the largest number of supercomputers China has ever claimed on the TOP500 ranking, with the US presence shrinking to its lowest level since the list's inception 25 years ago.

Just six months ago, the US led with 169 systems, with China coming in at 160. Despite the reversal of fortunes, the 143 systems claimed by the US gives them a solid second place finish, with Japan in third place with 35, followed by Germany with 20, France with 18, and the UK with 15.

Researchers at UC Berkeley and UC Riverside have developed a new, ultrafast method for electrically controlling magnetism in certain metals, a breakthrough that could lead to greatly increased performance and more energy-efficient computer memory and processing technologies. The findings of the group, led by Berkeley electrical engineering and computer sciences (EECS) professor Jeffrey Bokor, are published in a pair of articles in the journals Science Advances (Vol. 3, No. 49, Nov. 3, 2017) and Applied Physics Letters (Vol. III, No. 4, July 24, 2017).

Computers use different kinds of memory technologies to store data. Long-term memory, typically a hard disk or flash drive, needs to be dense in order to store as much data as possible. But the central processing unit (CPU) - the hardware that enables computers to compute - requires its own memory for short-term storage of information while operations are executed. Random Access Memory (RAM) is one example of such short-term memory.

At the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, scientists were hard at work researching how to produce mechanical Graphene sensors. Working with membranes measuring only two atoms thick, there are 13 micrometer-sized round air filled cavities in a silicon surface (silicon oxide) that are covered by double-layered Graphene. Upon observing these samples, the scientists noticed that the colors of the membranes differed. When the pressure within the cavities varied, the air 'bubbles' became concave or convex, changing how light refracted through them and created different colors.

At first this disappointed the scientists, as it became apparent that the small bubbles were not homogeneous enough to build a sensor. However they quickly noticed that the effect showed promise for an entirely different path of research - the Mechanical Pixel. The scientists speculate that screens built using this technology could eventually lead to much more flexible, durable and energy efficient panels than current LED technology allows. They do however caution that this research is very much in stages of infancy, it remains to be seen whether this mechanization of Graphene could conclude in screens of comparable quality or be scaled up to mass production. Bear in mind the samples that are currently being worked with would produce a panel with a pixel density north of 1,000 DPI. An explanation for mechanical color pixels can be found in this Vimeo video.

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