April 7, 2017

Leiden University creates smallest Dutch supercomputer

Filed under: IT by Orangemaster @ 3:17 pm

Little Green Machine II, the successor of Little Green Machine I built in 2010, is a Dutch supercomputer built by researchers at Leiden University together with help from IBM. It has a computing power of more than 0.2 Peta FLOPS, which is 200,000,000,000,000 calculations per second and will be used by researchers in oceanography, computer science, artificial intelligence, financial modeling and astronomy.

The biggest difference between the two LGMs is that LGM II uses graphics cards that are made for big scientific calculations, and not default video cards from gaming computers. As well, it uses OpenPower architecture developed by IBM instead of architecture from Intel. Little Green Machine II can apparently be carried around on a big bicycle – how Dutch is that.

The little supercomputer will be tested by simulating a collision between the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy, hence the Dutch space pic.

(Link: phys.org, Photo: A coloured photo of Hanny’s Voorwerp)

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August 16, 2008

Supercomputer wins game of Go

Filed under: Gaming,Science,Technology by Branko Collin @ 12:53 pm

Engadget writes:

You know how Go nerds are always going on about how magical they are since supercomputer AI hasn’t yet cracked the ancient board game, and rarely beats even an average Go player? […] Well, those folks can wipe the smug grins off their faces as they’re faced with the sobering reality of defeat: Dutch supercomputer “Huygens” has defeated a human Go professional in an official match at the 24th Annual Congress of the game Go in Portland [USA].

The newly-minted supercomputer was aided by the recently-developed Monte-Carlo Tree Search algorithm, a whopping 60 teraflops of processing power and a considerable 9 stone handicap. Poor Kim MyungWan — who managed to beat the computer in three “blitz” games leading up to the actual match, and probably won’t be hanging up his Go hat just yet — didn’t stand a chance.

Huygens is the brand-new national supercomputer, named after Christiaan Huygens (mathematician, astronomer and physicist) and his father Constantijn (poet). I imagine it takes the tiniest of quantum computers to make this type of story a thing from the past. (A bit hard to explain, but quantum computers can calculate all the possible solutions to a problem at once.)

Link.

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