For at least 70 years scientists, researchers and lay people have been comparing the brain to the computer (actually, I remember that when I was young, taking the very first course on computers in high school, the computer was called “cervello elettronico”, Electronic Brain in Italian). The pursue of an …
Read More »Happy Birthday, cell phone!
Yesterday it was the 50th anniversary of the first “recorded” call made by a cell phone. Motorola and Bell Laboratories have been working for several years to develop a wireless communication system. However, Ball Labs focussed on a device to be carried by a car, and that made sense given …
Read More »4.5 billion years ago
This is a blog about the future and about technology potential to shape the future. This news is the farthest away from any future, it is actually about something that might have happened some 4.5 billion years ago (150 million give or take) at a time when the solar system …
Read More »New chips to increase and distribute (artificial) intelligence
Last year NVIDIA announced, among several other things, the commitment to develop a Digital Twin of the Earth, Earth-2. The goal was/is to create a DT that can mirror those aspects of the planet that are involved in its climate and to simulate their influence in climate change. This is …
Read More »Chips for AI training
For quite some time the “chip” business was restricted to very few companies that were able to invest huge capitals in the design and manufacturing and because of that huge investment required a big market to sell their products. That led to the design and production of “one-size-fits-all”, in other …
Read More »Exascale computing is getting near
It looks like the roadmap towards Exascale computer power is – almost – on track. The University of Florida is expecting a 700 PFLOPs computer to become operational early next year. That would be 30% short of an Exascale power (a billion billion instructions per second). Interestingly -watch the clip- …
Read More »US are back on (with) SUMMIT of computational power
Waiting for the official ranking of the 500 fastest supercomputer in the world the bet is that after a gap of 5 years the US are going to claim the N.1 spot of the ranking, displacing the Chinese Sunway TahiuLight computer with SUMMIT, the new supercomputer installed by IBM at …
Read More »Simulating the human brain: an exascale effort
As of Spring 2018 the fastest computer is the Sunway Taihulight, Wuxi – China. It has 10,649,600 processing cores, clustered in group of 260 each and delivering an overall performance of 125.44 PetaFLOPS (million of billions of instructions per second) requiring some 20MW of power. In the US the National …
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