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A routine backup procedure meant to safeguard data of researchers at Kyoto University in Japan went awry and deleted 77 terabytes of data, Gizmodo reported. The incident occurred between December 14 and 16, first came to light on the 16th, and affected as many as 14 research groups at the university.

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France’s Jean Zay supercomputer, one of the most powerful computers in the world and part of the Top500, is now the first HPC to have a photonic coprocessor meaning it transmits and processes information using light. The development represents a first for the industry.

The breakthrough was made during a pilot program that saw LightOn collaborate with GENCI and IDRIS. Igor Carron, LightOn’s CEO and co-founder said in a press release: “This pilot program integrating a new computing technology within one of the world’s Supercomputers would not have been possible without the particular commitment of visionary agencies such as GENCI and IDRIS/CNRS. Together with the emergence of Quantum Computing, this world premiere strengthens our view that the next step after exascale supercomputing will be about hybrid computing.”

The technology will now be offered to select users of the Jean Zay research community over the next few months who will use the device to undertake research on machine learning foundations, differential privacy, satellite imaging analysis, and natural language processing (NLP) tasks. LightOn’s technology has already been successfully used by a community of researchers since 2018.

PARIS, Dec. 23, 2021 – LightOn announces the integration of one of its photonic co-processors in the Jean Zay supercomputer, one of the Top500 most powerful computers in the world. Under a pilot program with GENCI and IDRIS, the insertion of a cutting-edge analog photonic accelerator into High Performance Computers (HPC) represents a technological breakthrough and a world-premiere. The LightOn photonic co-processor will be available to selected users of the Jean Zay research community over the next few months.

LightOn’s Optical Processing Unit (OPU) uses photonics to speed up randomized algorithms at a very large scale while working in tandem with standard silicon CPU and NVIDIA latest A100 GPU technology. The technology aims to reduce the overall computing time and power consumption in an area that is deemed “essential to the future of computational science and AI for Science” according to a 2021 U.S. Department of Energy report on “Randomized Algorithms for Scientific Computing.”

INRIA (France’s Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation) researcher Dr. Antoine Liutkus provided additional context to the integration of LightOn’s coprocessor in the Jean Zay supercomputer: “Our research is focused today on the question of large-scale learning. Integrating an OPU in one of the most powerful nodes of Jean Zay will give us the keys to carry out this research, and will allow us to go beyond a simple ” proof of concept.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlwZawQhIKM

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The predicted existence of an exotic particle made up of six elementary particles known as quarks by RIKEN researchers could deepen our understanding of how quarks combine to form the nuclei of atoms.

Quarks are the fundamental building blocks of matter. The nuclei of atoms consist of protons and neutrons, which are in turn made up of three quarks each. Particles consisting of three quarks are collectively known as baryons.

Scientists have long pondered the existence of systems containing two baryons, which are known as dibaryons. Only one dibaryon exists in nature—deuteron, a hydrogen nucleus made up of a proton and a neutron that are very lightly bound to each other. Glimpses of other dibaryons have been caught in nuclear-physics experiments, but they had very fleeting existences.

Recently, a research team at Osaka University has successfully demonstrated the generation of megatesla (MT)-order magnetic fields via three-dimensional particle simulations on laser-matter interaction. The strength of MT magnetic fields is 1–10 billion times stronger than geomagnetism (0.3–0.5 G), and these fields are expected to be observed only in the close vicinity of celestial bodies such as neutron stars or black holes. This result should facilitate an ambitious experiment to achieve MT-order magnetic fields in the laboratory, which is now in progress.

Since the 19th century, scientists have strived to achieve the highest magnetic fields in the laboratory. To date, the highest magnetic field observed in the laboratory is in the kilotesla (kT)-order. In 2020, Masakatsu Murakami at Osaka University proposed a novel scheme called microtube implosions (MTI) to generate ultrahigh magnetic fields on the MT-order. Irradiating a micron-sized hollow cylinder with ultraintense and ultrashort laser pulses generates hot electrons with velocities close to the speed of light. Those hot electrons launch a cylindrically symmetric implosion of the inner wall ions towards the central axis. An applied pre-seeded magnetic field of the kilotesla-order, parallel to the central axis, bends the trajectories of ions and electrons in opposite directions because of the Lorentz force. Near the target axis, those bent trajectories of ions and electrons collectively form a strong spin current that generates MT-order magnetic fields.

In this study, one of the team members, Didar Shokov, has extensively conducted three-dimensional simulations using the supercomputer OCTOPUS at Osaka University’s Cybermedia Center. As a result, a distinct scaling law has been found relating the performance of the generation of the magnetic fields by MTI and such external parameters as applied laser intensity, laser energy, and target size.

Quantum computers have the potential to solve important problems that are beyond reach even for the most powerful supercomputers, but they require an entirely new way of programming and creating algorithms.

Universities and major tech companies are spearheading research on how to develop these new algorithms. In a recent collaboration between University of Helsinki, Aalto University, University of Turku, and IBM Research Europe-Zurich, a team of researchers have developed a new method to speed up calculations on quantum computers. The results are published in the journal PRX Quantum of the American Physical Society.

“Unlike classical computers, which use bits to store ones and zeros, information is stored in the qubits of a quantum processor in the form of a quantum state, or a wavefunction,” says postdoctoral researcher Guillermo García-Pérez from the Department of Physics at the University of Helsinki, first author of the paper.

Recently, Microsoft Azure joined the Top 10 club of the TOP500 super computer rankings by delivering 30.05 Petaflops. It was based on Microsoft’s recently announced Azure NDm A100 80GB v4, available on demand. These Azure NDm A100 v4 instances are powered by NVIDIA GPU acceleration and NVIDIA InfiniBand networking.

Microsoft today highlighted the latest (December 2021) MLPerf 1.1 results in which Azure delivered the #2 performance overall and the #1 performance by a cloud provider.

A roundup of news from SC21: With Frontier still not online, still no official Exascale systems in the Top500.