Supercomputer News

Elon Musk's artificial intelligence startup xAI has developed a Grok AI chatbot and the company will need 100,000 specialised semiconductors to train and run the next version of its conversational Al Grok reportedly. 

A recent simulation by a Japanese supercomputer named Fugaku has claimed that plastic face shields are ineffective in curbing the spread of coronavirus COVID-19 as they are almost totally ineffective at trapping respiratory aerosols. Fugaku, which is the world’s fastest supercomputer, created a simulation to detect that almost 100% of airborne droplets of less than 5 micrometres in size escaped through plastic face shields. One micrometre is one millionth of a metre.

The supercomputer Google used for the MLPerf training round is four times larger than the Cloud TPU v3 Pod. It had set three records in the previous competition. The system includes 4096 TPU v3 chips and hundreds of CPU host machines, all connected via an ultra-fast, ultra-large-scale custom interconnect.

A supercomputer capable of calculations five times quicker than the current record-holder is being developed.

  SpaceX is poised to launch an unmanned cargo ship toward the International Space Station Monday, including a super-computer that could direct astronauts on future deep-space missions.

Called the Spaceborne Computer, the system is designed to last for up to a year, which according to the company, is roughly the amount of time it will take to travel to Mars.

Expected to be ready by 2017, the superefficient computer plan is a part of the government’s policy that aims at helping Japan regain its position in the world as a technology giant at a time when the country is facing stiff competition from China and South Korea. 

Hitler's Lorenz machine boasted 1.6 million billion possible coding combinations thanks to a series of twelve rotors, a million times more complex than the more feted Enigma machine.

Imagine that your idle phone is helping power cancer research as you hit the sack. With a new app, Australia's Garvan Institute of Medical Research and the Vodafone Foundation want to create a "supercomputer" that will use the free power from your smartphone to help speed up cancer research.