A pair of astrophysicists at the Rochester Institute of Technology has found via simulations that some black holes might be traveling through space at nearly one-tenth the speed of light. In their study, reported in Physical ...
A team of researchers at Microsoft Quantum has reportedly achieved a first milestone toward creating a reliable and practical quantum computer. In their paper, published in the journal Physical Review B, the group describes ...
A team of astronomers has discovered one of the biggest black holes ever found, taking advantage of a phenomenon called gravitational lensing.
Astronomy
Mar 28, 2023
28
436
Ultra-massive black holes are the most massive objects in the universe. Their mass can reach millions and billions of solar masses. Supercomputer simulations on Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC)'s Frontera supercomputer ...
Astronomy
Mar 1, 2023
0
1156
The mystery of how the first quasars in the universe formed—something that has baffled scientists for nearly 20 years—has now been solved by a team of astrophysicists whose findings are published in Nature.
Astronomy
Jul 6, 2022
2
2709
The light released from around the first massive black holes in the universe is so intense that it is able to reach telescopes across the entire expanse of the universe. Incredibly, the light from the most distant black holes ...
Astronomy
Jan 23, 2019
37
2384
(Phys.org)—It was a an interesting week for physics as a team with the Australian National University conducted an experiment that confirmed quantum theory weirdness—they carried out John Wheeler's famous delayed-choice ...
Phonons—the elemental particles that transmit both heat and sound—have magnetic properties, according to a landmark study supported by Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) services and recently published by a researcher group ...
General Physics
May 28, 2015
5
6928
New observations of a recently exploded star are confirming supercomputer model predictions made at Caltech that the deaths of stellar giants are lopsided affairs in which debris and the stars' cores hurtle off in opposite ...
Astronomy
May 7, 2015
0
1471
Two teams of astronomers led by researchers at the University of Cambridge have looked back nearly 13 billion years, when the Universe was less than 10 percent its present age, to determine how quasars - extremely luminous ...
Astronomy
Jan 16, 2015
15
916
A supercomputer is a computer that is at the frontline of current processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation. Supercomputers introduced in the 1960s were designed primarily by Seymour Cray at Control Data Corporation (CDC), and led the market into the 1970s until Cray left to form his own company, Cray Research. He then took over the supercomputer market with his new designs, holding the top spot in supercomputing for five years (1985–1990). In the 1980s a large number of smaller competitors entered the market, in parallel to the creation of the minicomputer market a decade earlier, but many of these disappeared in the mid-1990s "supercomputer market crash".
Today, supercomputers are typically one-of-a-kind custom designs produced by "traditional" companies such as Cray, IBM and Hewlett-Packard, who had purchased many of the 1980s companies to gain their experience. As of July 2009[update], the IBM Roadrunner, located at Los Alamos National Laboratory, is the fastest supercomputer in the world.
The term supercomputer itself is rather fluid, and today's supercomputer tends to become tomorrow's ordinary computer. CDC's early machines were simply very fast scalar processors, some ten times the speed of the fastest machines offered by other companies. In the 1970s most supercomputers were dedicated to running a vector processor, and many of the newer players developed their own such processors at a lower price to enter the market. The early and mid-1980s saw machines with a modest number of vector processors working in parallel to become the standard. Typical numbers of processors were in the range of four to sixteen. In the later 1980s and 1990s, attention turned from vector processors to massive parallel processing systems with thousands of "ordinary" CPUs, some being off the shelf units and others being custom designs. Today, parallel designs are based on "off the shelf" server-class microprocessors, such as the PowerPC, Opteron, or Xeon, and most modern supercomputers are now highly-tuned computer clusters using commodity processors combined with custom interconnects.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
