High-Tech Pavement Markers Support Autonomous Driving in Tough Conditions

 High-Tech Pavement Markers Support Autonomous Driving in Tough Conditions, Remote Areas

Oak Ridge National Laboratory

June 20, 2023

Engineers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Western Michigan University have enabled raised pavement markers to transmit global positioning information that improves autonomous driving in remote areas or during inclement weather. The researchers embedded low-powered sensors within the markers that send information to passing cars about road shape even when obstructions reduce the reliability of vehicle cameras or light detection and ranging (LiDAR). The technology hands over some data processing from the car's software to infrastructure, saving electric vehicle battery power and broadening driving range. The researchers said electrical vehicle navigation systems use up to 90% less power when navigating with the sensor-equipped pavement markers, compared to leading camera and LiDAR-based autonomous driving technology.   ... ' 

Europe, Germany, Gets first Exascale Super Computer

Europe get a big computing push.   See here for more about the specs of Exascale computing.

EUROPE GETS AN EXASCALE SUPERCOMPUTER    

Germany will host JUPITER, Europe’s entry into the exascale realm     in Spectrum IEEE

The existing supercomputing resources at the Forschungszentrum Jülich, shown here, will soon be augmented by JUPITER, Europe’s first exascale supercomputer. SASCHA KREKLAU/FORSCHUNGSZENTRUM JÜLICH

FRONTIER, THE WORLD’S FIRST exascale supercomputer—or at least the first one that’s been made public—is coming online soon for general scientific use at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Another such machine, Aurora, is seemingly on track to be completed any day at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. Now Europe’s getting up to speed. Through a €500 million pan-European effort, an exascale supercomputer called JUPITER (Joint Undertaking Pioneer for Innovative and Transformative Exascale Research) will be installed sometime in 2023 at the Forschungszentrum Jülich, in Germany.

Thomas Lippert, director of the Jülich Supercomputing Center, likens the addition of JUPITER, and the expanding supercomputing infrastructure in Europe more broadly, to the construction of an astonishing new telescope. “We will resolve the world much better,” he says. The European Union–backed high-performance computing arm, EuroHPC JU, is underwriting half the cost of the new exascale machine. The rest comes from German federal and state sources.

Exascale supercomputers can, by definition, surpass an exaflop—more than a quintillion floating-point operations per second. Doing so requires enormous machines. JUPITER will reside in a cavernous new building housing several shipping-container-size water-cooled enclosures. Each of these enclosures will hold a collection of closet-size racks, and each rack will support many individual processing nodes.

How many nodes will there be? The numbers for JUPITER aren’t yet set, but you can get some idea from JUWELS (shorthand for Jülich Wizard for European Leadership Science), a recently upgraded system currently ranking 12th on the Top500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. JUPITER will sit close by but in a separate building from JUWELS, which boasts more than 3,500 computing nodes all told.   ... ' 

SmartMaterials Microscope

 FROM ACM TECHNEWS

Self-Driving Microscopes Discover Shortcuts to New Materials  

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory are training microscopes to find new materials faster using an intuitive algorithm. ...

Oak Ridge National Laboratory  ... 

Considering, Designing the Quantum Internet

Most interesting upcoming ACM talk.   An area we are now exploring.  Register at the link.

Title: Quantum Networks: From a Physics Experiment to a Quantum Network System

Date: Tuesday, September 01, 2020    Duration: 1 hour 
Time: 11:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time

Summary
The internet has had a revolutionary impact on our world. The vision of a quantum internet is to provide fundamentally new internet technology by enabling quantum communication between any two points on Earth. Such a quantum internet can —in synergy with the “classical” internet that we have today—connect quantum information processors in order to achieve unparalleled capabilities that are provably impossible by using only classical information.

At present, such technology is under development in physics labs around the globe, but no large-scale quantum network systems exist. In this talk, we will discuss some of the efforts to move from an ad-hoc physics experiment to a scalable quantum network system. We start by providing a gentle introduction to quantum networks for computer scientists, and briefly review the state of the art. We continue to present a network stack for quantum networks, and a give an overview of a link layer protocol for producing quantum entanglement as an example.

We close by providing a series of pointers to learn more, as well as tools to download that allow play with simulated quantum networks without leaving your home.

SPEAKER
Stephanie Wehner
Delft University of Technology
Stephanie Wehner is Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Professor, and Roadmap Leader in Quantum Internet and Networked Computing at QuTech, Delft University of Technology. Her goal is to understand the world of small particles – the laws of quantum mechanics – in order to construct better networks and computers. She has written numerous scientific articles in both physics and computer science, and is one the founders of QCRYPT, which has become the largest conference in quantum cryptography. At present, she serves as the coordinator of the European Quantum Internet Alliance. From 2010 to 2014, her research group was located at the Centre for Quantum Technologies, National University of Singapore. Previously, she was a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology. In a former life, she worked as a professional hacker in industry.

MODERATOR
Travis Humble
Director, Quantum Computing Institute, Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Co-EiC, ACM Transactions on Quantum Computing
Travis Humble is a Distinguished Scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Director of the lab's Quantum Computing Institute. 

Summit Supercomputing Cracking Covids Code

Saw the supercomputing systems tested with combinatorial problems.  Will this be a coup for understanding Covid?

Has Summit Cracked Covid's Code?
IEEE Spectrum
Mark Anderson
August 2, 2020

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory may have uncovered how the novel coronavirus causes disease, as well as identifying new potential therapies. The supercomputer-powered genetic study of Covid-19 patients found a common pattern of gene activity in the lungs of symptomatic patients. Lung fluid samples from Covid-19 patients found an over-expression of genes that produce bradykinin (a compound that controls blood pressure) and an under-expression of genes that would inhibit or break down the compound. Oak Ridge's Summit and Rhea supercomputers also found an increase in hyaluronic acid in the lung due to down-regulated genes that might otherwise have kept levels of this gelatin-like substance in check. The researchers identified 10 therapies developed for other conditions that could potentially address these issues. ... "