/ News
Green500 Inventor Asked to Improve Robo-Bugs
The man who designed the world’s most energy-efficient supercomputer in 2011 has taken on a new task: improving how robo-bugs fly.
Wu-chun Feng, an associate professor of computer science in the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech, previously built Green Destiny, a 240-node supercomputer that consumed 3.2 kilowatts of power—the equivalent of a couple of hair dryers. That was before theGreen500, a list that Feng and his team began compiling in 2005, which ranks the world’s fastest supercomputers by performance per watt.
(Feng also designed HokieSpeed, which topped the Green500 list in 2011. It cost a mere tenth of one percent of Japan’s K Computer, which topped the TOP500 list of the fastest supercomputers at the time. HokieSpeed relied on 8,320 cores worth of Intel Xeon 6-core, 2.4-GHz E5645 chips, and the Nvidia Tesla C2050 accelerator.)
On Feb. 5, the Air Force’s Office of Scientific Research announced it had awarded Feng $3.5 million over three years, plus an option to add $2.5 million funding over an additional two years. The contract’s goal: speed up how quickly a supercomputer can simulate the computational fluid dynamics of micro-air vehicles (MAVs), or unmanned aerial vehicles. MAVs can be as small as about five inches, with an aircraft close to insect size expected in the near future. While the robo-bugs can obviously be used for military purposes, they could also serve as scouts in rescue operations.
Feng and his team, made up of representatives from both Virginia Tech and North Carolina State University, will build computational fluid dynamic (CFD) codes and a supporting hardware-software ecosystem for modeling that airflow over MAV wings and rotors. If everything goes well, the end result will be stable, manageable flight.
It’s still unclear what hardware Feng will utilize for the project, although two things are known: first, he plans to “couple innovative advances in algorithms and mathematics with engineering progress in the co-design of hardware and software in supercomputing.” Second, he could pursue a “many-core” approach, possibly including accelerators such as the Intel Xeon Phi or the Nvidia Tesla; he said that many domain scientists and engineers are still using how to exploit parallelism in both hardware and software.
“Coupling hardware-software co-design with advances in algorithmic innovation offers the promise of multiplicative speed-ups,” he added.
Based on his earlier work, Feng said the Virginia Tech research team should be able to “achieve substantial speed-up over current simulations and provide significantly better utilization of the underlying and co-designed hardware-software of a supercomputer.” In a separate email, he also implied that his team would be going the accelerator route: “We have experience with many accelerator-based platforms, ranging from low-power mobile GPUs to commodity GPUs to high-performance GPUs as well as integrated CPU+GPU cores on a die and many others.” While additional platforms “will be brought in and evaluated,” Feng and his team will rely on HokieSpeed, at least at first.
As the project moves forward, Feng wrote in his email, his team intends to “incorporate the ecosystems of our other in-house accelerated systems, i.e., others from NVIDIA (e.g., K20), AMD (e.g., Trinity, Tahiti, etc.), Intel (e.g., MIC), and others.” They’ve found that the co-design process “can reap significant dividends, particularly if programmability, portability, and productivity can be addressed.”
Source: http://slashdot.org/topic/datacenter/green500-inventor-asked-to-improve-robo-bugs/
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Founded by Russian entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov in February 2011 with the participation of leading Russian specialists in the field of neural interfaces, robotics, artificial organs and systems.
The main goals of the 2045 Initiative: the creation and realization of a new strategy for the development of humanity which meets global civilization challenges; the creation of optimale conditions promoting the spiritual enlightenment of humanity; and the realization of a new futuristic reality based on 5 principles: high spirituality, high culture, high ethics, high science and high technologies.
The main science mega-project of the 2045 Initiative aims to create technologies enabling the transfer of a individual’s personality to a more advanced non-biological carrier, and extending life, including to the point of immortality. We devote particular attention to enabling the fullest possible dialogue between the world’s major spiritual traditions, science and society.
A large-scale transformation of humanity, comparable to some of the major spiritual and sci-tech revolutions in history, will require a new strategy. We believe this to be necessary to overcome existing crises, which threaten our planetary habitat and the continued existence of humanity as a species. With the 2045 Initiative, we hope to realize a new strategy for humanity's development, and in so doing, create a more productive, fulfilling, and satisfying future.
The "2045" team is working towards creating an international research center where leading scientists will be engaged in research and development in the fields of anthropomorphic robotics, living systems modeling and brain and consciousness modeling with the goal of transferring one’s individual consciousness to an artificial carrier and achieving cybernetic immortality.
An annual congress "The Global Future 2045" is organized by the Initiative to give platform for discussing mankind's evolutionary strategy based on technologies of cybernetic immortality as well as the possible impact of such technologies on global society, politics and economies of the future.
Future prospects of "2045" Initiative for society
2015-2020
The emergence and widespread use of affordable android "avatars" controlled by a "brain-computer" interface. Coupled with related technologies “avatars’ will give people a number of new features: ability to work in dangerous environments, perform rescue operations, travel in extreme situations etc.
Avatar components will be used in medicine for the rehabilitation of fully or partially disabled patients giving them prosthetic limbs or recover lost senses.
2020-2025
Creation of an autonomous life-support system for the human brain linked to a robot, ‘avatar’, will save people whose body is completely worn out or irreversibly damaged. Any patient with an intact brain will be able to return to a fully functioning bodily life. Such technologies will greatly enlarge the possibility of hybrid bio-electronic devices, thus creating a new IT revolution and will make all kinds of superimpositions of electronic and biological systems possible.
2030-2035
Creation of a computer model of the brain and human consciousness with the subsequent development of means to transfer individual consciousness onto an artificial carrier. This development will profoundly change the world, it will not only give everyone the possibility of cybernetic immortality but will also create a friendly artificial intelligence, expand human capabilities and provide opportunities for ordinary people to restore or modify their own brain multiple times. The final result at this stage can be a real revolution in the understanding of human nature that will completely change the human and technical prospects for humanity.
2045
This is the time when substance-independent minds will receive new bodies with capacities far exceeding those of ordinary humans. A new era for humanity will arrive! Changes will occur in all spheres of human activity – energy generation, transportation, politics, medicine, psychology, sciences, and so on.
Today it is hard to imagine a future when bodies consisting of nanorobots will become affordable and capable of taking any form. It is also hard to imagine body holograms featuring controlled matter. One thing is clear however: humanity, for the first time in its history, will make a fully managed evolutionary transition and eventually become a new species. Moreover, prerequisites for a large-scale expansion into outer space will be created as well.
Key elements of the project in the future
• International social movement
• social network immortal.me
• charitable foundation "Global Future 2045" (Foundation 2045)
• scientific research centre "Immortality"
• business incubator
• University of "Immortality"
• annual award for contribution to the realization of the project of "Immortality”.
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