cross pond high tech

TOP500 released an update to its list of the fastest supercomputers in the world, with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory leading the way. In its debut earlier this month, Summit clocked in at 122 petaflops of compute power on High Performance Linpack (HPL), a benchmark used to rank supercomputers ranked on the TOP500 list.

Summit uses more than 27,000 Nvidia graphics processing unit chips (GPU), and five of the seven fastest supercomputers in the world utilize Nvidia GPUs — like the Tesla V100, which first made its debut in May 2017. Summit has already been used to do things like apply machine learning in the search for genetic links between diseases or explore materials that can be used for superconductors.

“When we first started talking about the original Tesla K80 back in 2015, we were only contributing about 11 percent of the list that year, if I add up all the computational horsepower on the top of the list,” Nvidia VP Ian Buck told VentureBeat. “This year, the majority of 56 percent of the computation on the list is coming from GPUs, and this really talks to the adoption of accelerated computing, of using GPUs for solving the kinds of problems and building the kinds of systems that are necessary to advance computing.”

Also new to the list is Sierra. Housed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Sierra is now ranked the world’s third-fastest supercomputer, with 71 petaflops of compute power.

Both Summit and Sierra were built by IBM and include IBM Power9 CPUs.

The TOP500 updates its ranking of top supercomputers every six months.

The new rankings were announced today at the International Supercomputing Conference being held this week in Frankfurt, Germany.

Also announced today, Nvidia released nine new GPU Cloud computing containers to make it easier to work with deep learning frameworks.

The United States regains the title of owning the word’s fastest supercomputer after years of Chinese dominance.

New Bristlecone processor could deliver 'quantum supremacy' over traditional computing, researchers hope.

Google's Quantum AI Lab has shown off a new 72-qubit quantum processor called 'Bristlecone', which it says could soon achieve 'quantum supremacy' by outperforming a classical supercomputer on some problems.

Quantum supremacy is a key milestone on the journey towards quantum computing. The idea is that if a quantum processor can be operated with low enough error rates, it could outperform a classical supercomputer on a well-defined computer science problem.

Quantum computers are an area of huge interest because, if they can be built at a large enough scale, they could rapidly solve problems that cannot be handled by traditional computers. That's why the biggest names in tech are racing ahead with quantum computing projects: in January Intel announced its own 49-qubit quantum chip, for example.

 

"We are cautiously optimistic that quantum supremacy can be achieved with Bristlecone," said Julian Kelly, a research scientist at the Quantum AI Lab.

"We believe the experimental demonstration of a quantum processor outperforming a supercomputer would be a watershed moment for our field, and remains one of our key objectives," Kelly said -- although he did not offer a timescale for this achievement.

Something strange is happening with text messages in the US right now. Overnight, a multitude of people received text messages that appear to have originally been sent on or around Valentine’s Day 2019. These people never received the text messages in the first place; the people who sent the messages had no idea that they had never been received, and they did nothing to attempt to resend them overnight.

Delayed messages were sent from and received by both iPhones and Android phones, and the messages seem to have been sent and received across all major carriers in the US. Many of the complaints involve T-Mobile or Sprint, although AT&T and Verizon have been mentioned as well. People using regional US carriers, carriers in Canada, and even Google Voice also seem to have experienced delays.

At fault seems to be a system that multiple cell carriers use for messaging. A Sprint spokesperson said a “maintenance update” last night caused the error. “The issue was resolved not long after it occurred,” the spokesperson said. “We apologize for any confusion this may have caused.”

T-Mobile blamed the issue on a “third party vendor.” It didn’t clarify what company that was or what service they provided. “We’re aware of this and it is resolved,” a T-Mobile spokesperson said.

The statements speak to why the messages were sent last night, but it’s still unknown why the messages were all from Valentine’s Day and weren’t sent in the first place. The Verge has asked Sprint and T-Mobile to provide more information about what happened.

Dozens and dozens of people have posted about receiving messages overnight. Most expressed confusion or spoke to the awkwardness of the situation, having been told by friends that they sent a mysterious early-morning text message. A few spoke to much more distressing repercussions of this error: one person said they received a message from an ex-boyfriend who had died; another received messages from a best friend who is now dead.

“It was a punch in the gut. Honestly I thought I was dreaming and for a second I thought she was still here,” said one person, who goes by KuribHoe on Twitter, who received the message from their best friend who had died. “The last few months haven’t been easy and just when I thought I was getting some type of closure this just ripped open a new hole.”

Barbara Coll, who lives in California, said she received an old message from her sister saying that their mom was upbeat and doing well. She knew the message must have been sent before their mother died in June, but she said it was still shocking to receive.

“I haven’t stopped thinking about that message since I got it,” Coll said. “I’m out looking at the ocean right now because I needed a break.” Coll said her sister also received a delayed message that she had sent about planning to visit to see their mother.

Another person said a text message that she sent in February was received at 5AM by someone who is now her ex-boyfriend. The result was “a lot of confusion,” said Jamie. But she said that “it was actually kinda nice that it opened up a short conversation.”

The Verge has reached out to Verizon, AT&T, and Google for comment.

Historically, startups have been the engine of US economy. By creating new jobs and surfacing new ideas, startups play an outsized role in making the economy grow.

It’s too bad they are a dying breed.

While companies that were less than two years old made up about 13% of all companies in 1985, they only accounted for 8% in 2014.

From around 1998 to 2010, the share of private sector workers in companies that were less than two years old plummeted from more than 9% to less than 5%.

A new report from the Brookings Institution, finds that in nearly every industry, from agriculture to finance, the share of new companies is falling.

 

So what’s going on?

It’s not entirely clear, but the authors of the Brookings report have some ideas.

One possibility: Startups are struggling in this era of rising market concentration. In most industries, since the 1980s, the share of all sales going to the top firms is increasing. Startups may have a hard time competing with these mega firms, which can out pay them for the best talent and sometimes attempt to drive them out of the industry. Previous Brookings research found there are fewer startups in states where a smaller number of companies dominate the market (pdf).

Another related possibility is that the most-educated American workers are no longer attracted to entrepreneurship. In 1992, 4% of 25-54 year olds with a master’s degree or PhD owned a small company with at least 10 employees. In 2017, this was true of only 2.2%. Companies started by the highly educated are often unusually productive.

The Brookings report suggests that high salaries for educated employees at big companies have made entrepreneurship less compelling. Why compete with Google or Walmart when they are offering you an enormous amount of money to come work for them?

Here is the list of 25 unusual predictions developed in this great post. They state that in the US : 

 

1. Life expectancy of autonomous vehicles will be less than 1 year
2. One Autonomous Car will Replace 30 Traditional Cars
3. Less than 4 million autonomous cars will replace 50% of all commuter traffic in the U.S.
4. Fleet owners will become the primary influencers on the design of new cars
5. Driverless cars will be electric vehicles
6. Electric vehicle range will exceed 1,000 miles per charge by 2027
7. Noise levels in cities will be cut in half
8. 80% of driverless cars will be one-passenger vehicles
9. 40% of sales tax will disappear
10. Over 10% of retail businesses will disappear
11. Police departments will shrink by 80%
12. U.S. will lose over $35 billion/year from gas taxes
13. New York City will lose over $2 billion per year in traffic fines
14. 41% of airport revenues will disappear
15. Cities will lose over 50% of their revenue
16. Healthcare industry will lose over $500 billion per year
17. There will be 700,000 fewer stolen vehicles per year
18. Auto insurance industry will lose over $150 billion a year
19. Location no longer matters
20. Remodeling garages in people’s homes will soon become a thriving industry
21. Over 5 million acres of parking lots will suddenly come available for redevelopment
22. Overall transportation costs will shrink by 50%
23. Car ownership will soon become a very expensive hobby
24. Overcrowding will officially come to an end
25. Driverless technologies will cause 1 in 4 jobs to disappear

the Fortune 500 is turning over at a faster and faster rate over time and here are some insights on the phenomenon