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.

Presenting NextPowerUp, our sister tech-publication in the works, designed with a bigger canvas. TechPowerUp established itself as one of the top PC hardware publications thanks to our pursuit for quality reviews and relentless news delivery. We decided it was time to put these core ideals to use, in addressing the much larger consumer electronics and gadgets markets, without disturbing TechPowerUp's focus on PC enthusiast content, one of its hallmarks.

NextPowerUp is designed to keep you up to speed on the latest in over 20 markets (and growing), each with its own content channel, and editors hand-picked for them. These include Audio (personal, home, professional, concert), Business, Cinema (filming, production, exhibition), Desktops (pre-built desktop PCs), Displays (signage, projectors), Gadgets, Gaming (games, game development, gaming industry, consoles), Internet (the business of WWW), Networking (social networking), Notebooks (notebooks, Ultrabooks, netbooks), Phones (of all shapes and sizes), Photo & Video (cameras of all shapes and sizes), Politics (industry soap-opera), Robots (outside assembly lines), Science (popular science, space exploration), Software, Storage, Tablets, Televisions (TVs and technologies built around them), Transportation (wheels that don't run on fossil fuels), and Wireless (Cellular carriers, commercial WiFi).

Signaling its commitment to energy-efficient high- performance computing, Intel Corporation today announced that it will work with HP to help design and provide the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) with a supercomputing system that will drive research across a number of energy-related initiatives, including renewable energy and energy-efficient technologies. The new High Performance Computer (HPC) data center promises to become one of the world's most efficient installations.

The system is scheduled to deliver full compute capacity in the summer of 2013 and will feature approximately 3,200 Intel Xeon processors including current-generation Intel Xeon processor E5-2670, future 22nm Ivy Bridge based processors and approximately 600 new Intel Xeon Phi co-processors. The total peak performance of the system is expected to exceed 1 Petaflop (equivalent to a thousand trillion floating point operations per second) and it will be the largest supercomputer dedicated solely to renewable energy and energy efficiency research. Leading energy-efficient capabilities of Intel Xeon processors and Intel Xeon Phi co-processors combined with the new HP warm water cooling solution and innovative data center design will result in this facility likely being the world's most efficient data center with a power usage effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.06 or better.

OCZ Technology Group, Inc. (Nasdaq:OCZ), a leading provider of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) for computing devices and systems, is pleased to announce the Deneva 2 Series SSDs will be used as the storage device of choice in a pending 'Data-Scope' research project at The Johns Hopkins University (JHU) to create servers for scientific data processing. This initiative to maximize data processing power is spearheaded by Dr. Alexander Szalay, Alumni Centennial Professor in the university's Department of Physics and Astronomy and Director of the JHU Institute for Data Intensive Engineering and Science.

With the goal of creating an affordable, powerful computational environment that can be used as a blueprint for future science applications, the JHU project comprises a system of nearly one hundred servers using hundreds of OCZ Deneva 2 SSDs combined with regular hard disk drives with two tiers for storage and computing. These powerful yet inexpensive systems also serve to expose students and researchers to leading-edge technology at an early stage.

University of Utah engineers designed a new kind of video game controller that not only vibrates like existing devices, but pulls and stretches the thumb tips in different directions to simulate the tug of a fishing line, the recoil of a gun or the feeling of ocean waves.

"I'm hoping we can get this into production when the next game consoles come out in a couple of years," says William Provancher, an associate professor of mechanical engineering who is in Vancouver, British Columbia, demonstrating the new game controller with his students March 5-7.

Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a new technique that allows graphics processing units (GPUs) and central processing units (CPUs) on a single chip to collaborate - boosting processor performance by an average of more than 20 percent.

"Chip manufacturers are now creating processors that have a 'fused architecture,' meaning that they include CPUs and GPUs on a single chip," says Dr. Huiyang Zhou, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering who co-authored a paper on the research. "This approach decreases manufacturing costs and makes computers more energy efficient. However, the CPU cores and GPU cores still work almost exclusively on separate functions. They rarely collaborate to execute any given program, so they aren't as efficient as they could be. That's the issue we're trying to resolve."

A new form of graphene created by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin could prevent laptops and other electronics from overheating, ultimately, overcoming one of the largest hurdles to building smaller and more powerful electronic devices.

The research team, which includes colleagues at The University of Texas at Dallas, the University of California-Riverside and Xiamen University in China, published its findings online today in the Advance Online Publication of Nature Materials. The study will also appear in the print journal of Nature Materials.

In an effort to make it easier for programmers to take advantage of parallel computing, NVIDIA, Cray Inc., the Portland Group (PGI), and CAPS enterprise announced today a new parallel-programming standard, known as OpenACC.

Initially developed by PGI, Cray, and NVIDIA, with support from CAPS, OpenACC is a new open parallel programming standard designed to enable the millions of scientific and technical programmers to easily take advantage of the transformative power of heterogeneous CPU/GPU computing systems.

OpenACC allows parallel programmers to provide simple hints, known as "directives," to the compiler, identifying which areas of code to accelerate, without requiring programmers to modify or adapt the underlying code itself. By exposing parallelism to the compiler, directives allow the compiler to do the detailed work of mapping the computation onto the accelerator.

At SC11, Intel Corporation revealed details about the company's next-generation Intel Xeon processor-based and Intel Many Integrated Core (Intel MIC)-based platforms designed for high-performance computing (HPC). The company also outlined new investments in research and development that will lead the industry to Exascale performance by 2018.

During his briefing at the conference, Rajeeb Hazra, general manager of Technical Computing, Intel Datacenter and Connected Systems Group, said that the Intel Xeon processor E5 family is the world's first server processor to support full integration of the PCI Express 3.0 specification**. PCIe 3.0 is estimated** to double the interconnect bandwidth over the PCIe* 2.0 specification** while enabling lower power and higher density server implementations. New fabric controllers taking advantage of the PCI Express 3.0 specification will allow more efficient scaling of performance and data transfer with the growing number of nodes in HPC supercomputers.

Memristors are a fourth class of electric circuit, first hypothesized way back in the 1970's, which are a new addition to the transistors, capacitors, resistors etc that go into making a silicon chip. HP has put a great deal of resources into developing this technology and is expected to release memory-like memristor products in 2013, so it's not far off from commercial deployment. Now however, the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) have found a way to use memristors to make what they describe as a "fully functional" flexible resistive random access memory (RRAM). This memory is built on a plastic substrate and can be randomly accessed, written to and erased. However, as this substrate is flexible, it can be bent and rolled up easily, opening up possibilities for use that haven't even been thought of yet.

Rice University and Duke University are the latest in a long line of educational institutions to fund research on the effect of using restrictive Digital Rights Management (DRM) to try and control levels of so-called "piracy", which is allegedly reducing sales of content-only, infinite goods/virtual products, such as music, movies, computer games and books. (Some observers writing about DRM replace the word "Rights", giving us the phrase Digital Restrictions Management, which seems a more accurate description of what it's really about and removes the veneer of legitimacy from it. When buying DRM'd content, you are buying digital handcuffs, nothing more, nothing less.) The universities sponsored a study called Music Downloads and the Flip Side of Digital Rights Management Protection and what it found is that contrary to popular belief amongst the big content companies, removing DRM can actually decrease levels of piracy and increase sales. The fact is that DRM is always broken by hackers and pretty quickly too, often within a day or two (there isn't a single one still standing) leaving legal users who work within its confinements with all the restrictive hassles that it imposes, while the pirates get an unencumbered product to do with as they please. How is this progress?

MIT engineers have created a kind of beltway that allows for the rapid transit of electrical energy through a well-known battery material, an advance that could usher in smaller, lighter batteries -- for cell phones and other devices -- that could recharge in seconds rather than hours. The work could also allow for the quick recharging of batteries in electric cars, although that particular application would be limited by the amount of power available to a homeowner through the electric grid.
The work, led by Gerbrand Ceder, the Richard P. Simmons Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, is reported in the March 12 issue of Nature. Because the material involved is not new -- the researchers have simply changed the way they make it -- Ceder believes the work could make it into the marketplace within two to three years.

An innovative and easily implemented technique in which nanoscale elements precisely assemble themselves over large surfaces could soon open doors to dramatic improvements in the data storage capacity of electronic media, according to scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst).
"I expect that the new method we developed will transform the microelectronic and storage industries, and open up vistas for entirely new applications," said co-lead investigator Thomas Russell, director of the Materials Research Science and Engineering Center at UMass Amherst, visiting Miller Professor at UC Berkeley's Department of Chemistry, and one of the world's leading experts on the behavior of polymers. "This work could possibly be translated into the production of more energy-efficient photovoltaic cells, for instance."

While some would dismiss "cyber sex", or two people pleasuring themselves/each other utilizing technology, as a childish game reserved for hackers and 14-year-old girls from California, a doctor from the University of Portsmouth says that there is much more to cyber sex than just that. A lot more people are having cyber sex than we would like to think, and have a detrimental effect on technology. Dr Trudy Barber decided to investigate what this effect is and how deep it runs. She completed her thesis on "Creative Digital Practice and Theory Mash-up", and will present it on Friday. Until then, The Inquirer was able to interview Dr.Barber on the effect of cyber sex on the world. Much like in real life, the desire for sexual gratification has led to some interesting innovations. AOL Instant Messenger, Webcams, and various services would likely not have seen the success that they have had if not for a lot of people seeking digital sexual gratification. Dr.Barber also asserts that the digital universe allows cyber sex partners to assume roles that they have always wanted to. Please follow the source link for The Inquirer's interview with Dr.Barber.

Microsoft says that it is hard to properly evaluate the way people interact with computers since questioning them at the time is distracting and asking questions later may not produce reliable answers. "Human beings are often poor reporters of their own actions," the company says. Instead, Microsoft wants to read the data straight from the user's brain as he or she works away. They plan to do this using electroencephalograms (EEGs) to record electrical signals within the brain. The trouble is that EEG data is filled with artifacts caused, for example, by blinking or involuntary actions, and this is hard to tease apart from the cognitive data that Microsoft would like to study. So the company has come up with a method for filtering EEG data in such a way that it separates useful cognitive information from the not-so-useful non-cognitive stuff. The company hopes that the data will better enable to them to design user interfaces that people find easy to use. Whether users will want Microsoft reading their brain waves is another matter altogether.

A professor of mathematics at the University of Rochester named Allan Greenleaf has solved a mathematical problem which could bring electromagnetic wormholes (EMW) into existence. These EMWs would create a full invisibility cloak in a tube which surrounds whatever they were employed to hide. Such devices could eventually be employed to make true 3D TV possible, and without special glasses. Researchers themselves admit this is a long way off from practical application. However, scientists are now theorizing about such things and believe that they are ultimately possible.

A few years ago, the $20 million USD X Prize kick-started a race into space. And now, the X Prize is going one step and $10 million USD further. The first private organization to land on the moon, travel 500 meters on the moon, take one gigabyte worth of video/pictures, and stream it back to Earth will win $30 million USD. Anyone can win, assuming that they are not working for any particular government. However, be advised, the cost of building such a craft and launching it is quite possibly much more than $30 million USD.

Anyone interested in visiting the techPowerUp! Forums user DaMulta at the moon base should enter the new space race here.

RFID tags recently have been finding all sorts of interesting uses. An RFID tag inside a pet can be used by animal shelters to figure out who exactly the animal belongs to, leading to a fast, happy reunion. With the recent FDA approval of RFID tagging of humans, businesses are considering using them as an easy way to keep track of employees. However, an independent firm questioned the FDA, and ran some controlled tests of their own. Their results are extremely surprising: test animals with the RFID tags came down with cancer more often than those that did not have the RFID tags. Some RFID manufacturers might acknowledge these results, and try to make a safer RFID tag. However, this may not be possible, as "it is common for inflamed tissue surrounding a foreign object in the body to develop cancerous cells".