Domain: lanl.gov
Stories and comments across the archive that link to lanl.gov.
Comments · 816
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Re:There is no technical or financial merit to thi
Why select a slower, more expensive platform and take on the cost of porting one's in-house software to yet another platform, when multi-processor AMD-64 chips running GNU/Linux are a dime a dozen?
And what price list are you referring to? It cost Virgina Tech $5.2 million US for a #3 spot in the worlds fastest computers.
On the other hand, an equally equipped Opteron (albeit an extra 600 processors over Big Mac) cluster cost about $10 million and trails Big Mac at #6.
My math may be a bit rusty, but isn't 3rd place better than 6th place, and 5 million less than 10 million?/p.
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Plasma ?!?!
What the hell is the plasma for?
Plasma? Maybe it's an atmospheric pressure plasma for decontamination of biohazards. But then again maybe not.
Maybe it's a microwave plasma fireball for shooting bad guys.
Nah. Its probably just one of these dumb things from Spencer's Gifts.
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Re:Cold fusion will always be with us
If you insist on bringing up ZPF, at least put a credible link next to your crackpot link.
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Science by press releaseMaybe I haven't looked hard enough, but I can't seem to find a paper submitted to a peer-reviewed journal, and there's nothing on the pre-print servers.
When scientists are sure of their data, the first thing they do does not involve a press release. I'll be more convinced once I've seen it in a reputable journal -
Re:This is a boondoggle
Asteroid (meteor?) strikes are more common than you'ld think; just in 1908 what was probably a comet struck Siberia with the force of a good-sized atom bomb and leveled 1200 square miles of forest. Had an inhabited area been struck, destruction would have been massive.
Our best estimates seem to be this this is likely to happen every few hundred years; given that such an event might kill millions, it seems worth a minimal effort to take out a bit of insurance, and at least as sensible as banning GMOs. -
Pulsars can do as good or better than this...
High precision timing of millisecond pulsars (which accounts for every single rotation of a pulsar over the course of several years) can make observations with astrometric (i.e. positional) errors of several micro arcseconds.
An excellent example was published in Nature in 2001. Here is a preprint. The work describes the timing of the nearby (~450 lt-yrs) millisecond pulsar J0437-4715. The proper motion (movement across the sky) and parallax (apparent motion on the sky due to the earth's orbit) of the pulsar were measured to extreme precision, and a new test of General Relativity was also given.
PS: IAAPA (I am a pulsar astronomer) -
Re:Spam from Co-workers?If you read the paper on the archive you will see that there is a method to deal with this problem.
Namely, when someone joins a spam and non-spam component of the network.
PS: This method was tested on email boxes from the "Real World", but of course, we could use more email boxes to test with. Please send me a tarball of all your email and I will tune the algorithm!
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on the moon? think again --The first warning sign was that we were being told to listen to someone who uses the word "technopolitical" in his job description. The second was that he was writing for the National Review Online, a magazine that has decided to throw it's lot in with "lie through the teeth" conservatism.
In the article, the author writes, with all the assurance that this is not just his belief, but rather a fact to be "remembered":
But it is worth remembering that a permanent presence on the moon will provide a far better platform for a space telescope, and it is likely a telescope will be put there.
As the slashdot saying goes, "BZZZZZT!" In fact, astronomers and instrumentation people have considered "moon bases," and concluded that there is absolutely no good reason to go all the way up to the moon (a very expensive trip between gravity wells) instead of putting your telescopes in low Earth orbit. The most enthusiastic moon astronomers want to do radio stuff -- not replicate Hubble's optical work.
Does the Lunar Surface Still Offer Value As a Site for Astronomical Observatories?, by three members of JPL, Goddard and UT, and published in Space Policy (I guess NRO wasn't taking articles then) provides the full story.
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For the science buffs here...
A paper detailing the discovery has been submitted to The Astrophysical Journal Letters for publication. The postscript version is online at the lanl preprint archive here.
Also it has to be pointed out that the diamond is INSIDE the planet, so getting it out would require us to blow through 30 miles of very hard rock. -
Transmeta Cluster
Here is an example of a transmeta cluster.
LANL Transmeta Cluster (PDF Link)
And by cant run on the underlying hardware directly, you mean that you cant run on the bare core of the transmeta chip, as opposed to it's x86 translation layer?
As far as I know Linux runs fine on top of it's translation layer, as the chip was designed to do. -
Re:Ladies and Gentlemen: The Scientific Method
What I find funny and sad is that for those who don't believe in God and yet come to a dead end as how to explain something (like where did the ball of matter come from that became the universe?)
What I find funny is that your god explanation is no more plausible to the independant observer than the big bang theory. They're just different ideas for the same question: What was the first thing?" God? Well, who put God there? He just always was because he's magic and being human we can't understand? Maybe the super dense ball of matter was always there and you don't understand because you're a fucking moron that knows nothing about physics and so you try to explain stuff you don't understand as being magic. Way to keep it real, guy who is apparently from the 14th century trying to keep it real.
P.S. read this pdf: here" -
Re:misleading characterizations...
In case you want to read a more scientific version of this article, it's here.
The first thing that occurs to me upon reading it is that his proposal for sweeping the CMB anisotropies under the rug, the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect, really isn't an issue in WMAP's lower frequency bands. Even if he's right and the 94 GHz band is slightly contaminated, there remains the four other frequency bands, and those show the same spectrum of anisotropies as everyone else. (WMAP is hardly the first to measure the CMB anisotropies. Check out ACBAR, MAXIMA, CBI, COBE, BOOMERANG, DASI and others and convince me that they all got it wrong too.)
And anyway, the SZ effect is well-understood; a couple large surveys are coming on line in the next couple years that hope to map out galaxy clusters using their SZ signatures on the CMB (APEX-SZ and the South Pole Telescope, for example). Noteably, they're all observing at much higher frequencies (220 GHz, etc) than WMAP.
WRT the large-scale WMAP power spectrum points, the cosmic variance (uncertainty that comes from the fact that we can only observe one universe, rather than a whole ensemble of them) dominates on those scales, so as the WMAP team has pointed out, those points need to be taken with a grain of salt. You can't throw out the concordance cosmological model based on them, certainly.
His point about SNIa evolution is well-taken, to a point, though it's been addressed in some detail by both the Perlmutter and Reiss groups.
Essentially, Shanks's problem boils down to a complaint that we still don't understand dark energy or dark matter, and it would be nice to do away with them. He's right on both counts, but at this point there's too much evidence in their favor to discard them so readily. -
Another theory
There is also a theory that does not require any other matter or energy to account for the structure of the universe. The Electric Universe This is build on the work of Halton Arp who believes the is an error in our use of redshift to determine the distance of objects and likewise their age, and the work of plasma physicists who have their own theory about things
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One more problem with your assertions
I recall Technetium being radioactive, and therefore unstable.
The link also mentions: ...All the isotopes of technetium are radioactive. It is one of two elements with Z < 83 that have no stable isotopes; the other element is promethium (Z = 61). -
Re:should called it "nobelium"
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the environmental concerns over RTGs
If obsessed environmentalists don't like NASA sending up probes with any radioactive material ('it might blow up, ohh..'), then how did this little tidbit get by them?
Give us "obsessed" environmentalists some credit, 99% of us can differentiate quite well, thank you:
1) Each Mars rover's RTGs contain less than an ounce (8 LWRHUs with 2.67g each) of Pu-238; Pathfinder's a quarter-ounce (3 LWRHUs). nothing you'd like to swallow, indeed: lethal dose for Pu-238 is 30 micrograms inhaled. It's one of the most toxic, mutagenic, and carcinogenic substances known to man. While an ounce of such stuff is not trivial, it pales next to Cassini's load: 10.8 kg (24 pounds) of Pu-238. This should suffice to explain the different level of concern generated by these missions even to cyclopedian dunderheads.
2) As for blowing up, I have some news for you: Challenger. Columbia. NASA's own estimate for the probability of "catastrophic launch failure" of the rocket used to send up Cassini was 1 in 20. Sending things into orbit on top of the world's largest firecrackers is *inherently* unsafe. Might blow up, indeed. Even so, catastrophic launch failure was *not* a major concern: the Pu-238 is embedded in a ceramic matrix, and its container designed to withstand explosion of the launch vehicle. NASA worst-case scenarios were a contaminated launch pad.
3) What *was* cause for concern were the Earth gravity-assist flybys. A navigational error (metric/english conversion, anyone?) could have sent Cassini to burn up in the atmosphere. In the intervening years in space, its own alpha-rays weaken the ceramic matrix to the point where such an accident could release powdered Pu-238. Worst-case scenario for *that* was as much release of Pu-238 as all above-ground nuclear tests, ever, *combined*. Not Armageddon, but a Chernobyl-scale disaster in terms of the number of statistically attributable additional cancer deaths.
4) The concentration of so much lethal potential (300 million doses) in *any* one device of whatever nature raises certain concerns. Pu-238 is *the* material of choice for dirty bombs - 250 times as carcinogenic as the Pu-239 used in nuclear weapons. The RTG requirements of NASA and DoD are the only reason why Pu-238 is produced and stockpiled in the US. A single stolen 150g pellet of Pu-238 could be used to give up to a million people in a chosen location certain lung cancer. Nice terrorist potential there - 9/11 in slow mo. Cassini carried 72 such pellets. I sure hope security around these things is 100%. Wait a minute, there is no such thing as 100% security - doh!
Having said all that, I (environmentalist and all) still think that, for lack of better alternatives, the outer planet missions and the small Martian RTG heaters are worth the risk. IMO NASA actually does quite a good job evaluating these risks for each mission (thus no juiced-up Mars buggy, ever - sorry!), it's the DoD putting RTGs in LEO that worries me.
Finally, to the smartass trolls spewing baseless comments such as "more radioactivity in my backyard", "radiation is radiation", "we tested nukes in the atmosphere in the 50s with no ill effect": 1) you're utterly wrong, 2) think before you post. If thinking is too hard for you, at least google before you post. If googling is too hard for you, shut up and learn something.
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Where to buy?
Found a useful looking list at Aerogel Suppliers. Nothing in Canada listed, unfortunately...
The main site though, Hubert's aerogel page, seems to have an interesting collection of links on Aerogels. -
Where to buy?
Found a useful looking list at Aerogel Suppliers. Nothing in Canada listed, unfortunately...
The main site though, Hubert's aerogel page, seems to have an interesting collection of links on Aerogels. -
Helium-3 fusion rocketsIf we could actually build He-He fusion rockets, which we don't know how to do, that would be a workable propulsion system. That reaction doesn't create neutrons, and if the gammas were absorbed into distilled water to produce steam and thrust, the radioactive waste problem would be minor. The fuel fraction would be far lower than with chemical rockets. We'd finally be able to build a space vehicle that didn't spend most of its fuel trying to lift fuel.
We don't need lunar mining to do this. Helium 3 has been made in kilogram quantities over the years. Tritium decays into helium-3 with a half life of 12 years, and fifty years of tritium production for H-bombs has resulted in a stockpile of helium-3. It's a weird fuel cycle. Tritium is created by transmutation in nuclear reactors, loaded into H-bombs, allowed to decay, and replaced with fresh tritium after a few years. Helium-3 is then separated out from the decayed tritium.
The US's tritium production facility (Savannah River, K-reactor) has been shut down since 1993. A replacement facility is being built to do transmutation the hard way - with a big linear accelerator. This is hopeless as a power source, of course. But it might be acceptable as a way to make fuel for fusion rockets. Tritium is also being produced in some of Canada's heavy-water reactors, and one of the TVA's reactors is being modified to produce tritium. But right now, the supply is a bit tight. Not too tight, though; you can buy tritium-illuminated exit signs and watches.
The US tritium and helium-3 stockpile sizes are classified, because they give a hint as to how many US nuclear weapons are still functional. The Accelerator Production of Tritium facility is supposed to make about 3Kg of tritium per year, which provides a sense of what can be produced.
This isn't cheap, but it doesn't require a giant lunar mining infrastructure. If He-He fusion can be made to work, it's the cleanest and safest way to go.
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Re:Anyone in Atlanta or who knows these guys?
From poking around on their website, here's a preprint article, and there's another paper which discusses spectroscopic confirmation.
These are Lyman emitting galaxies, initially identified using a special camera with narrow band filters targeted at this redshift (a previously known z = 2.38 cluster was in the field which I think is why they picked it). They then used a multi-object spectrograph (2dF) to spectroscopically confirm the redshifts (second paper).
Doug -
Re:where is the peer review?parent wrote:
" That search engine at http://xxx.lanl.gov/find is hard to use isn't it?"That host's called "xxx"? What's that, pr0n for 31337 Phy5ici5t5?
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Who modded this over "1"? RTFA
First: Some following posts show the author didn't even do a rudimentary search of the archive let alone anything else. A place to start for example, "Where are all these zillions of states hiding in a black hole?" Mottola said in a recent article in New Scientist magazine. "It is quite literally incomprehensible." or The "unique and remarkable properties" of a gravastar "could explain several high-energy astrophysical phenomena that now are puzzling," says Marek Abramowicz, a black hole expert at Gothenburg University. Oh, and Mottola was a researcher at Los Alamos' Theoretical Division. RTFA, dude.
Second: Anyone involved with the scientific community in the least, should know that peer review is actually quite a contentious issue and by no means considered as accounting for "all fault-finding".
Third: The theory itself resolves some troubling issues with black hole theory. The latter has become so fashionable that even lay men speak of them without seeming to question some of the root concepts that stretch all but a seasoned physicist's imagination. A quote from a related article: Physicists have struggled for years to account for the huge entropy of black holes, and largely have failed. Unlike their black hole counterparts, Gravastars would have a very low entropy.
Finally: This linkis to the Los Alamos release ... yes, it was released by a very presitigious research lab.
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where is the peer review?
I can't find any papers from the said authors on the physics archive, so these two obviously aren't well known or respectable among the scientific community. A lack of peer review in a strata where peer review accounts of all fault-finding leads me to believe this articles credibility is the same as those of new-age magazines who which posting about the Bermuda triangle and the creation fabled
self-professed scientists.
Until some well-known scientist confirms this, I think I'll just believe the 'official' story about black holes.
Just my 2 dollars.
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Answer: Green DestinyAnyone know if there is a Beowulf Cluster of these chips or the VIA ones?
Green Destiny at Los Alamos has 240 TM5600s.
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Re:Does this make it a:
No, but with the right materials and time to develop a Pentium with superconducting transistors, they are only 13 K away from being able to use a "high temperature" superconductor. -100 C is 173 K, and according to my link, one of the highest temperature superconductor they have found works at 160 K. Not that I RTFA; it was
/.ed at 50 posts. -
Re:Interesting note/errataBecause an eavesdropper cannot accurately measure the bit's value using both of these competing standards, the only parties who can know the value of a string of such bits are the sender and receiver. And since an outsider measuring the system disturbs it, the sender and receiver also know whenever their line has been tapped.
In fiber connections typically when a line is spliced connection is cut. According to historic sources, quotes, etc., the NSA managed to cut through fiber, get a tap in, without causing any flux or attenuation. First I would think some form of either mirroring or perhaps the use of a gem diamond, etc., but there would have to be some flux somewhere along the line, unless of course they hit up some of the repeaters or junctions in order to accomplish their goal. Think about a direct line of sight clearly... Even with Quantum crypto your line of sight is passing through channels, equipments, and if the NSA managed to break that light, sniff keys, AND THE CIPHERTEXT, etc., using a quantum computer themselves (the eavesdropper(s)), they'd be able to reconstruct a message (perhaps), maybe even using a distributed quantum network.
Strangely I wish I had this link up for Los Alamos' Quantum crypto labs but it looks like it was taken down.
So long as the parties on both ends use their key only once and know that they are the only owners of this key -- a certainty which quantum crypto provides -- then they are guaranteed security. Source for italics is an older Wired Article
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More links
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Well you could have found it
Like I did here.
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Age of the Universe
If we limit the age of the universe to 13.7 billion years, that puts some fairly tight constraints on the evolution of life, especially advanced civilizations, in the universe.
If the universe is older by a older by a small amount or perhaps a few billion years, or even greater (which an eventual solution to the age paradox might bring us to), the possibilities for extra-terrestrial life become more and more possible.
Given enough time, even "kooky" theories like the panspermia hypothesis become more and more likely, since distance, lack of speed, and survivability drastically cut the probabilities of anything resembling viable life making it across the vast tracts of space, but time increases it.
(Not to say that it happened, of course - run-of-the-mill abiogenesis could easily have happened instead... or as well.)
Panspermia is a bit worrisome a possibility, in some ways. It would mean that some/many/all alien civilizations might share anything from RNA to DNA to histones to mitochondria. Depending on how advanced the 'seeded' lifeform was (could be anything from a fragment of proto-RNA to a whole eukaryote), we might have to worry about not only bacteria on our future journeys to the stars, but viruses as well. On the plus side, chirality may be conserved, so we don't end up starving to death eating left-handed sugar (L-sucrose) and starch on alien worlds when some layabout gardener on staff mixes salt and Roundup in the fertilizer in the Earth terrarium.
There, that's my fun little bit of tinfoil hat speculation
:)Klaatu berrada nicto...
Er, I mean, back to your irregular program...
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Re:how does this compare?
Like Lightning, a Linux-based Opteron cluster ranked at #6 in the newly released 2003 list?
By "of its kind" the article meant that is used for oceanography. By "fastest" they mean that it excelled in ECCO. -
Re:Less heating=Denser packing
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Link to a preprint of the PRL
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Re:Nay, archetypal...Warning, some of my entries are slightly OT...but all pertain. You don't need to be purely scientific to be academic in nature or purpose.
In terms of pure science and academa, a few have been reasonably covered here already. A few from my personal library:
Anything from Donald Knuth
Andrew Tannenbaum and most of his publications
The greatest fundamental contributor to all great science, however, is inspiration. WRT/scientific inspiration, a few loom large in my mind...
Most things from:Marvin Minsky (Negative Expertise was at one point groundbreaking for me)
Richard Feynman holds a place in my personal history
Douglas R. Hofstadter and his writting, Godel, Escher, Bach
Roger Penrose and his writting, The Emperors New Mind
Carl Sagan, especially his work in The Demon-Haunted World. I read this in more recent years, and found myself launched into a new understanding and exploration of the nature of science and humanity.
...and pick any of the large number of scifi authors, of course.UA
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Re:What's the difference?
There is no one answer to this question, but there are a few things to consider.
First off, commodity processors simply have WAY larger economies of scale. NEC is just about the only company left designing actual processors for supercomputers (their SX series, as used by Earth Simulator, among others). The simple fact is that even if you sell 5,000 processor for a supercomputer, you're probably only going to sell one or two of those a year if you're REALLY lucky. For comparison, Intel sells ~130 million x86 chips a year. Simply put, there's a LOT more money going into the R&D for commodity chips.
The story is somewhat similar for high bandwidth/low latency I/O. Ethernet still isn't going to cut it except for pretty small clusters, but things like myrinet, quadrics and infiniband get you at least within the same ballpark as traditional supercomputer designs. They aren't quite there yet though, and this is still a major shortcoming of cluster design. However, there are at least two supercomputers I've seen that use a sort of hybrid design with AMD Opteron processors. AMD's Opteron has really nifty "hypertransport" point-to-point I/O connections right on-chip. A couple companies (most noteably Cray, but also a little guy called OctigaBay) are using the mostly-commodity hardware of AMD Opteron systems and a custom interconnect chips that hang directly off hypertransport links to create massively parallel processing supercomputers. This may be the way of the future for supercomputers, not exactly a cluster but still built from almost entirely commodity parts.
Next is the simple benchmark itself. LINPACK is a relatively simple benchmark that is fairly easy to run in parallel. Some supercomputer applications closely mirror this (Linpack is just solving linear equations after all, and that's the main thing that a lot of supercomputers are used for), others do not. In many cases though, I/O bandwidth and latency really become your limiting factor. Unless your data can be very easily cordoned off into little chunks that run on each node, you tend to spend all of your time waiting for data from remote machines. In the case of the Big Mac with 10GBit ethernet, you're looking at a best case scenario of getting 1/5th of the bandwidth of local memory (1.25GB/s vs. 6.4GB/s) and at more than an order of maginitude higher latency (~100ns vs ~2us; note of course that these are quick 'n dirty estimates, but the ratios are reasonably accurate). What's even worse, even on the nodes themselves the memory bandwidth is fairly low and latency rather high for most tasks (always has been for supercomputers, regardless of the arechitecture), so your taking a performance hit in an area that the system is already weak. Linpack doesn't necessarily show this weakness too much, but actual applications run on the supercomputer might. As always, YMMV.
I hope this doesn't sound like I'm just feeding you some line about I/O, but.. umm.. I/O is really where you differentiate the men from the boys in supercomputers.
FWIW, you might want to check out this PDF. It's Cray describing their new Red Storm architecture, and among other things it talks a lot about the challanges that supercomputers face.
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I am using this in my electronics class.
I am going to discuss why they made this site with my electronics class. First I am going into what do the students think should be in the hall of fame, then I am going into who built the site and why. I have some students working independently on BEAM robots. I thought this might spur on an interest in battle bots. What does everyone think?
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Re:to paraphraseAny references I can read? astro-ph will do fine...:-)
I think he's talking about an anomalous acceleration of the Pioneer spacecraft of around 8.5x10^-8 cm/s^2 that was first reported several years ago. As far as I can tell, whether or not this effect can be explained by conventional sources is still a subject of some debate. I'm not an expert on the literature, but some references that talk abut the issue are J.D.Anderson et al, Phys. Rev. Lett. 81,2858(1998) and L.K. Scheffer, Phys. Rev. D 67,084021(2003). These articles provide some estimates of the size of the anomalous acceleration and some attempts at explaining it using conventional physics. A quick search on lanl turns up, for example, this paper along with numerous others.
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First CNOT in solid state, not first CNOT
This is not the first controlled-not gate for a quantum computing system but rather the first in this solid state system.
Other implementations of a controlled-not gate (or its close relative, a controlled-phase gate) include:
Caltech Quantum Optics implemented a controlled-phase gate between photons using a strongly coupled atom in a cavity.
Serge Haroche's group implemented a controlled-phase between an atom and a photon using microwave cavities and atomic Rydberg states.
NIST Ion Storage Group: implemented a two qubit gate (which could be turned into a controlled-not) and a four qubit gate using trapped ions.
NMR quantum computing has been implemented by various groups including the biggest quantum computation to date, factoring 15, done by Isaac Chuang's group (IBM and now MIT.)
A proof of principle implementation of a controlled-not in the linear optics quantum computing scheme has been implemented at the University of Queensland.
I'm leaving out quite a few other cool experiments: but the above links should give you a good idea of the what early steps have been taken in quantum computing. -
Re:No more encryption?Doesn't quantum cryptography require a point to point optic channel capable of successfully transmitting individual photons without interfering with their polarization?
You can do it in open air, even during the daytime using optical frequency photons. That's what the folks at Los Alamos are doing. They have a range of about 10km now, and think that a satellite implementation should be feasible. If that happens (and you can trust the satellite) it would in principle enable secure communication anywhere.
Of course, right now the bit rate is pretty low (about 45,000 secret bits/hour in daylight, better at night), but that is mostly due to low yield on the detectors, which could hopefully improve over the next several years.
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Supercomputer article
For anyone interesting in learning a bit more about what some of the issues are when creating a super-computer, you might want to have a look at the following:
The article is talking about Cray/Sandia's new Red Storm machine, a supercomputer using over 10,000 AMD Opteron processors that is expected to be competitive with the Earth Simulator for the #1 spot on the Top500 list. It does, however, talk about a lot more than just the specifics of this cluster, describing what some of the bottlenecks in supercomputers are and how to avoid/work around them.
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best price/performance ratio?As has already been pointed out, KASY0 has better price/performance on Linpack. Also, the Space Simulator at Los Alamos was built over a year ago from Intel P4 hardware, and is currently listed at #88 on the TOP500 list, so it certainly qualifies as a supercomputer. It acheived 757.1 Gflops on Linpack, and cost $484,000 in September 2002. So, that's works out to a Linpack Tflop per 1.56 million, vs the current (improved) result of 8.2 Tflops/5.2 million, or 1.58. So, the cluster price/performance is about the same between the brand new G5 Big Mac hardware, and year-old Intel P4 hardware.
The cluster is certainly an important milestone, though. The days of being locked in to buying a commercial architecture that was designed three years ago and costs 10x too much are over.
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Opteron cluster 2800 CPUS/1400 nodes
Opteron cluster of 2800 CPUS/1400 nodes.
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Gravity waves != gravitational waves
Allright, IAAP (I Am A Psysicist), and I think it's good two debunk a common misconception here:
Gravity waves are not the same as gravitational waves
Gravity waves are matter density waves in fluidi (fluids or gases) caused by the interaction of two forces: bouyancy and gravity. Here, bouyancy is the upward-driving force, and gravity is the downward-driving force. The essence is that these waves require a medium to propagate (e.g. air).
Gravity waves can be found in the atmosphere, e.g. clouds which form in regular bands of cloud and clear sky, where the gravity waves carry momentum and energy from the troposphere to the middle and upper atmosphere Gravity waves can also be found on the surface of fuilds: think of the waves behind a boat. A good primer on gravity waves can be found here
Gravitational waves are a whole different ballgame! These waves have got nothing to do with matter densities as they don't require a medium to progagate: it is not matter that moves, and in that respect gravitational waves are like light (which, contrary to beliefs held at the beginnning of the century, don't require a medium such as "ether"). Gravitational waves are wacves in the spacetime-metric.
So what the hell does that mean? Well, in gravity waves, there is a wave in space (and time) in which the thing that changes over space and time is the density of matter. In gravitational waves, there also is a wave in space and time, but the thing that "wiggles" is not the density of matter (or the strength of electric and magnetic fields, like in light or EM radiation in general), but the properties of the fabric of space and time itself. You can think of it as if the coordinate system itself wiggles, so to speak. This "wiggling" results in the length of the arms of e.g. the LIGO interferometer to change ever so slightly, causing a phase shift between light beams send through both arms, which can (hopefully) be detected.
In more mathematical terms, the exact properties of space and time are called the metric. In a portion of space without any matter, the metric is flat (called the Minkovski metric), which means that the usual laws of geometry apply. In any circumstances with matter (and thus gravity) present, these laws to do hold up!
What?!, I hear you think. Yes sir, you've been lied to in geometry class! However, you've been lied to only very, very slightly. Example: if you measure the radius of a sphere (say: R), you expect to find a surface area of exactly 4/3 * pi * R^3. If the earth would be a perfect sphere (which it isn't), and you would be able to measure its radius and surface very accurately, you would find that the surface area is ever so slightly smaller than expected. Or, in other words, the radius seems to be a bit too large (in the order of 3 cm or 30 cm IIRC). Read more about space time curvature here/
A primer on gravitational waves can be found here. A more detailed description here.
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drool over this, baby!
Pink at LANL has the following:
1024 nodes
2048 cpus
1024 power cables
1024 Myrinet network cards
2048 fiber cables (8.8 miles)
3072 Myrinet switch ports
4096 sticks of RAM (2 Terabytes)
7168 fans
1 hard drive
1 CDROM drive
Not only do they have pictures of its assembly, they have movies.
Check the web page for more stats and better quality movies.
Oh, yes, it's unclassified :) -
drool over this, baby!
Pink at LANL has the following:
1024 nodes
2048 cpus
1024 power cables
1024 Myrinet network cards
2048 fiber cables (8.8 miles)
3072 Myrinet switch ports
4096 sticks of RAM (2 Terabytes)
7168 fans
1 hard drive
1 CDROM drive
Not only do they have pictures of its assembly, they have movies.
Check the web page for more stats and better quality movies.
Oh, yes, it's unclassified :) -
Electrostatic overshoes and strapped to a balloon?
Being sent to swim with the red sprites would be suitable punishment for an errant high-tech company.
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pity they can't have private namespaces
we have them in Plan 9. and they've been there for the past 14 years -- each user, each process, each device exists in its own namespace and views the system differently.
my / != your /
after years and years of trying maybe it's time you guys really do something about it -- jails are a temporary solution, and not a very good one at that.
you need full private namespaces for the same reason you need local variables in your programs -- it's just too nasty otherwise. -
Re:What about the classified ones?
Not really. The top500 list lists LANL's ASCI Q at 20.48 Peak TFLOPS and LLNL's ASCI White at 12.29 Peak TFLOPS.
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Re:What about the classified ones?
Not really. The top500 list lists LANL's ASCI Q at 20.48 Peak TFLOPS and LLNL's ASCI White at 12.29 Peak TFLOPS.
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Re:Qubit
thought that quantum computing was probably going to be viable within ten years, and will probably be far more advanced than any of the fabrication methods they listed in the article. Their web site talks a little bit about DARPA's quantum computing projects, but the page seems to be a little outdated. Anyone know if they're pursuing this as well?
The quant-ph list might have activity with freshness a little more to your liking: quant-ph Aug 2003. Or, just check out xxx.lanl.gov - yes it's real, yes it's useful, no it's not goatse.
That said, with the potential applications of quantum computing in cryptography (especially brute-force cracking and decryption), it's unlikely that anything close to the bleeding edge is in the public eye. -
Re:Qubit
thought that quantum computing was probably going to be viable within ten years, and will probably be far more advanced than any of the fabrication methods they listed in the article. Their web site talks a little bit about DARPA's quantum computing projects, but the page seems to be a little outdated. Anyone know if they're pursuing this as well?
The quant-ph list might have activity with freshness a little more to your liking: quant-ph Aug 2003. Or, just check out xxx.lanl.gov - yes it's real, yes it's useful, no it's not goatse.
That said, with the potential applications of quantum computing in cryptography (especially brute-force cracking and decryption), it's unlikely that anything close to the bleeding edge is in the public eye.