Nvidia is making a 3D map of the universe with the world’s most powerful AI supercomputer
Nvidia has fired up a new supercomputer said to be the fastest in the world for AI workloads at the National Energy Research Scientific Computer Center (NERSC) in California.
The supercomputer is named after astrophysicist Saul Perlmutter and will initially be tasked with building the most ambitious 3D map of the universe ever seen, utilizing the 6,000+ Nvidia A100 Tensor Core GPUs on board.
In its current state, Perlmutter is capable of delivering almost four exaFLOPS of AI performance, which Nvidia says makes it “the fastest system on the planet on 16- and 32-bit mixed-precision math AI uses”. Its performance will be bolstered further as part of “phase two”, with the introduction of a second tranche of CPU cores.
Once the system is complete, it is expected to fall within the top five supercomputers in the Top 500 rankings, which assesses overall performance using the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark.
Nvidia supercomputer
According to Nvidia, more than 7,000 researchers will put the Perlmutter system to work and tens of applications have already been readied with the goal of advancing astrophysics and climate science.
“In one project, the supercomputer will help assemble the largest 3D map of the visible universe to date. It will process data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), a kind of cosmic camera that can capture as many as 5,000 galaxies in a single exposure,” explains a blog post from Dion Harris, Nvidia HPC & AI Product Marketing Lead.
“Researchers need the speed of Perlmutter’s GPUs to capture dozens of exposures from one night to know where to point DESI the next night. Preparing a year’s worth of data for publication would take weeks or months on prior systems, but Perlmutter should help them accomplish the task in as little as a few days.”
The hope is that the universe map, once complete, will help researchers learn more about dark energy, the force behind the ever-accelerating expansion of the universe. The discovery of dark energy in 2011 earned Saul Permutter the Nobel Prize.
Other projects set to run on the Perlmutter machine have similarly ambitious goals. A number of them will make use of the unique qualities of the Tensor Cores in the A100 to simulate interactions between atoms, which has previously been next to impossible.
This work could prove revelatory in the field of materials science, by potentially uncovering ways to develop more efficient batteries, biofuels and the like.
Facebook denies end to 'WFH forever' rule in wake of mega outage
Is the era of hybrid working coming to at an end for Facebook employees? That's the suggestion of a report detailing a full return to the office for all of the social media staffers -- a report Facebook tells TechRadar is categorically wrong.
Wrestling with the changing nature of office work after the COVID-19 outbreak, Facebook offered a "WFH forever" approach last year, as detailed by Mark Zuckerberg in May of 2020 during a livestream on his personal Facebook page.
"I think that it’s possible that over the next five to 10 years - maybe closer to 10 than five, but somewhere in that range - I think we could get to about half of the company working remotely permanently,” Zuckerberg said. A Daily Mail report Thursday claimed that Facebook was ending this policy completely - a report Facebook tells TechRadar is flat out wrong.
"The Daily Mail article is completely inaccurate," a company representative told us. "There has not been a change to our policy. As we announced in August, we are working to return our teams safely back to the office in January 2022."
The news came days after Facebook suffered a major outage, which the Daily Mail suggested would have been a lot less devastating had people been in its American headquarters.
Some reports claimed company keycards were also knocked offline, meaning employees were unable to gain access to the offices or the server rooms - with some claiming employees were forced to, quite literally, break in. In other words, the outage didn't just take down Facebook's website, along with Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp, but it also affected company resources.
Relying on internal servers
The largest tech companies have wrestled for months with how best to handle employees who either prefer to work from home or simply aren't allowed to return to offices yet. Google employees now have to apply to work from home, for example, while both Amazon and Apple expect the bulk of their workforce to return to the office in January 2022.
Explaining the root causes of the outage, Facebook said the worldwide disruption to its services was caused by 'configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers.'
The outage lasted for seven hours, also knocking out businesses who rely on Facebook and Instagram.
How Palm Pre and webOS inspired the modern smartphone
Back when I was the mild-mannered tech support in a store, I got to try out some of the smartphones that would be available for sale in the coming days.
One that still sticks out to me the most, apart from the iPhone 4, is the Palm Pre. Headed up by a group of ex-Apple engineers, it was an attempt to give the market something else, even in 2009.
While iOS and Android were in their early forms, with iOS 3 offering copy and paste that same year, Palm was a breath of fresh air. It gave us a wholly different OS to use, with features that wouldn't arrive in iOS and Android for another eight years.
It's been 12 years since the Palm Pre launched, but that little smartphone's impact can still be felt in 2021, especially some of the features of its webOS software. I managed to source one earlier this year, and have been using it alongside my iPhone 13 Pro.
Days of webOS past
The Palm Pre featured a rounded-edge design and a 3-inch display, with a touch-sensitive bar below that you could perform gestures on. From multitasking to going to the home screen, it freed up the keyboard below the display, which appeared by sliding up the Palm Pre's screen.
The device also had wireless charging, with an optional TouchStone charger. It was a round dock that required the back casing of the Palm Pre to be swapped in order for the charging method to work. While slow, it did the job – interestingly, the time taken to fully recharge was three hours, similar to wirelessly charging the iPhone X that was released eight years later in 2017.
webOS was showcased in 2009 as an operating system with a different take on multitasking for the Palm Pre: cards. Running apps could be managed and closed by swiping the cards from the gesture area below the screen. The same gesture could also be used to bring up the app drawer.
Sound familiar? Apple's iOS 4 software that included this feature was yet to be announced, so Palm's take was novel at the time in managing your active apps.
(Image credit: Future)
But it didn't stop there with interesting features. With Synergy, your contacts and backups could be synced up with the cloud, which you could then access on your PC or Mac.
In another instance, if you swiped down from the top right, you got a control center of settings, similar to what happens with the same gesture on today's iPhones. You could see how much battery life remained on the Palm Pre, alongside toggles for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Airplane mode.
(Image credit: Future)
Finally, a nice touch was accessing developer mode. You access this on Android by tapping on 'About Phone' deep in the Settings app, but here it was opened using a cheat code called the Konami Code.
In Konami games like Contra, Castlevania and Dance Dance Revolution the cheat code would unlock levels, difficulties and infinite lives when it was inputted.
On the Palm Pre, instead of pressing arrow keys for a game cheat, you typed the code in the launcher screen: upupdowndownleftrightleftrightbastart.
This enabled developer mode: a small but cool touch where you could install other apps that wouldn't have been available on Palm's App Catalog Store.
(Image credit: Future)
Considering this phone was released in 2009, followed by another model in 2010, it was ahead of its time in many ways. Yet, unfortunately, it came on the market too late. The iPhone was poised to reign supreme and then break the ceiling further with the iPhone 4.
Palm was bought by HP in July 2010, and eventually, the Pre ceased to be. However, webOS was spun into some of HP's printers, bizarrely, and it would also become part of some televisions, ensuring the webOS name is still around today.
Using the Palm Pre in 2021
In the Palm Pre I'm using now, I can use the built-in apps, but an internet issue renders the web browser, YouTube, and Google Maps apps useless. The camera has a built-in flash, but the images are blurry by 2021 standards.
Using the keyboard is still great, though. I wrote the header of this article in the Memos app with no issues, even with my big hands.
I can imagine a modern remake of the Palm Pre for 2022, with fewer bezels, a much better camera, and a slightly bigger keyboard, but that may have to be left in my imagination.
I'm still in the camp of wanting some skeuomorphism to come back, and seeing it across webOS in this smartphone was a big nostalgic throwback to 2009.
However, the Palm Pre remains a smartphone almost lost to time; where a new manufacturer could bring out a different smartphone that would set itself apart from iOS and Android.
It may have been released too late to be a serious contender, but its gestures and design are still relevant. The iPhone would adopt the swipe-up gesture in 2017, alongside the gesture for the Control Center in the top-right.
We may never see a similar phone again, but especially around this holiday time, it's worth reflecting on the past, present, and future of how we use our devices every day, and how certain decisions influenced others.
The Palm Pre was clearly an example of this back in 2009, and for that reason alone it's a phone to remember for years to come.
Save big on some of the best gaming processors with these Prime Day CPU deals
if you're looking to build a gaming PC, pick up one of these Prime Day deals on an Intel processor to save more cash for your graphics card - you'll need it.
How to get 'blue tick' on Twitter? New guidelines in place
Twitter will relaunch its account verification process in early 2021. It has put out guidelines that will determine whether the user is eligible to get verified on Twitter with a blue tick-mark.
