Posted by
Richard Silberman in
Another person for a smarter planet
Jason Hlady leads the World Community Grid team at the University of Saskatchewan
When Jason Hlady sees a computer that is turned on but not being used, just sitting there, idling away, he can’t help but think of the possibilities…
That dormant machine could, at that very moment, be running computations to help cure cancer or fight AIDS. It could be solving algorithms that might lead to clean water solutions, or reduce world hunger, or accelerate any number of other worthy research projects.
Hlady, a high performance computing coordinator at the University of Saskatchewan, wants to cut waste and tap the potential of idle computers across the university. To that end, he is leading the drive to get faculty and staff to connect to the World Community Grid — a global network that pools unused computing power and repurposes it for humanitarian research.
As leader of the university’s World Community Grid team, Hlady encourages colleagues to install software that connects their computers to the grid and runs research computations on the machines when they are on, but idle.
“When a computer sits idle, all that energy is just going up a smokestack,” Hlady said. “By joining the World Community Grid, we’re able to put otherwise wasted computing power to good use, helping solve some of the major problems facing our world today.”
Continue Reading »
Posted by
Richard Silberman in
Another person for a smarter planet
Igor Jurisica, Ph.D, uses the power of World Community Grid to conduct his cancer research.
When Igor Jurisica started doing cancer research 11 years ago, he worked with about a dozen colleagues using a handful of scientific workstations in a small lab in Toronto, Canada.
How times have changed.
Today, Jurisica, a senior scientist at Princess Margaret Hospital, Ontario Cancer Institute, conducts his research with the help of nearly 300,000 people spread across 100 countries running his calculations on over 900,000 devices. Continue Reading »
IBM's Watson computing system
When we think of the systems that make up a smarter planet, what typically comes to mind are industries like manufacturing, transportation, energy, or banking. But there is another ‘industry’ that needs to become smarter. We might call it the humanitarian industry. That is, the system that creates a safety net to support society and is made up of philanthropies, social services, education organizations, NGOs and government agencies.
In many ways, this is the most human of all systems. So it is ironic to consider how Watson, a computing system, could help us solve civic, social and cultural challenges and make smarter humanitarian decisions. But Watson’s deep QA technology presents new possibilities to do just that. Through private sector collaboration with nonprofits, Watson can become the next innovation to be used as a force for societal good.
Posted by
Steve Hamm in
I couldn’t help punning in the headline, but this new supercomputer at the U.S. Argonne Lab has only a little in common with psychologist Wilhelm Reich’s supposedly energy-gathering orgone box. The new computer, called Mira, which Argonne announced earlier this week, will be used to help the Department of Energy identify new materials and chemistry that could improve national competitiveness.
Mira, when she’s installed next year, will be a 10-petaflop computer–meaning she’ll be capable of performing 10 quadrillion calculations a second. Argonne already has a supercomputer, Intrepid, based on an earlier version of IBM’s Blue Gene technology. It’s a half-petaflop machine. Here’s a comparison that gives you a good idea of what a lot more processing power can do for scientists: Using the current generation of supercomputers operating worldwide, it takes about two years to run a simulation of how a human heart reacts to a new medicine. A 10-petaflop system would cut the wait time down to two days.
Argonne researcher Larry Curtiss hopes all this added computing horsepower will help him develop new materials that could stretch the miles traveled per charge on an electric car battery up to 500 miles, making EVs practical for many uses. “The new computer will help us create the next generation of batteries and make the United States more competitive,” says Curtiss.
11:35
Posted by
Kevin Winterfield in
Editor’s note: The following is a guest post from Dr. David Ferrucci, Principal Investigator, DeepQA/Watson, IBM
The clue: Two of the greatest human Jeopardy! television game show players, ever. The correct response: Ken Jennings. Brad Rutter.
Just as IBM set its sights on defeating a chess Grandmaster with Deep Blue in 1997, the company’s scientists have developed a Natural Language Processing, Question Answer machine, named Watson (after company founder Thomas J. Watson, Sr.), to challenge two of the world’s trivia grand masters, to be aired on U.S. television from February 14-16, 2011.
Win or lose on national television, Watson will answer the immediate questions, “does it answer questions accurately?” and “does it answer questions quickly?” with a resounding “yes.”
Beyond excitement for the match itself, the team of IBM scientists is motivated by the possibilities that Watson’s breakthrough computing capabilities hold for building a smarter planet and helping people in their business tasks and personal lives. Watson’s ability to understand the meaning and context of human language, and rapidly process information to find precise answers to complex questions, holds enormous potential to transform how computers help people accomplish tasks in business and their personal lives.
Watson will enable people to rapidly find specific answers to complex questions. The technology could be applied in areas such as healthcare, for accurately diagnosing patients, to improve online self-service help desks, to provide tourists and citizens with specific information regarding cities, prompt customer support via phone, and much more.
Like Deep Blue, Watson represents a major leap in the capacity of information technology systems to identify patterns, gain critical insight and enhance decision-making despite daunting complexity. But while Deep Blue was an amazing achievement in the application of compute power to a computationally well-defined and well-bounded game, Watson faces a challenge that is open-ended and defies the well-bounded mathematical formulation of a game like Chess. Watson has to operate in the near limitless, ambiguous and highly contextual domain of human language and knowledge.
Watson’s technology furthers IBM’s leadership in analytics solutions, which help organizations use the vast amount of information they collect to improve their business operations and service to their customers. Additionally, Watson harnesses IBM’s commercial POWER7 system, showcasing how IBM workload-optimized systems provide unmatched capabilities for processing thousands of simultaneous tasks at rapid speeds, once the realm of only scientific supercomputers.
Read more about the technology behind Watson at ibmwatson.com.
Posted by
jamesmathewson in
Editor’s note: The following is a guest post by Dave Turek, vice president, IBM Deep Computing. IBM is well known for dominating the Top500 lists of supercomputers. Less well known is the Green500 List, which ranks supercomputers not only on feeds and speeds, but energy consumption. This year, IBM dominated that list with 17 out of the top 20 machines on the list. This blog post highlights the significance of this achievement for Smarter Planet.
Energy efficiency is quickly becoming one of the most important metrics of supercomputing value. Just a few short years ago high performance computing (HPC) clients were concerned primarily with performance, and the cost of performance. The conversation has shifted dramatically. HPC clients are now equally concerned about power consumption and cooling requirements. For good reason, the cost to power an HPC environment today is nearly as much as the hardware.
Fifty percent of the energy consumed in today’s average data center goes toward cooling the systems and preventing overheating. Overheating, in turn, leads to reduced reliability. In fact, Wu-Chun Feng of Virginia Tech, one of the founders of the Green500 List of energy-efficient supercomputers believes that for every 10 degree Celsius increase in temperature the system failure rate doubles.
