Computer Science

Encryption today is typically a game of very large numbers. Some of today’s cryptographic systems, like RSA or elliptic-curve cryptography, utilize as keys integers that are hundreds or thousands of bits long. Cracking a key requires breaking down one of these integers into its prime-number factors. Even the mightiest non-quantum computers struggle to perform this calculation in any reasonable timeframe.That is why quantum hardware can completely rewrite the rules of encryption. Quantum computers have a potential weapon called Shor’s algorithm that can factorize colossal integers in a dramatically accelerated time.Fortunately for some, quantum computers aren’t yet powerful enough to wi..

Neural networks that imitate the workings of the human brain now often generate art, power computer vision, and drive many more applications. Now a neural network microchip from China that uses photons instead of electrons, dubbed Taichi, can run AI tasks as well as its electronic counterparts with a thousandth as much energy, according to a new study.AI typically relies on artificial neural networks in applications such as analyzing medical scans and generating images. In these systems, circuit components called neurons—analogous to neurons in the human brain—are fed data and cooperate to solve a problem, such as recognizing faces. Neural nets are dubbed “deep“ if they possess multi..

Although the race to power the massive ambitions of AI companies might seem like it’s all about Nvidia, there is a real competition going in AI accelerator chips. The latest example: At Intel’s Vision 2024 event this week in Phoenix, Ariz., the company gave the first architectural details of its third-generation AI accelerator, Gaudi 3. With the predecessor chip, the company had touted how close to parity its performance was to Nvidia’s top chip of the time, H100, and claimed a superior ratio of price versus performance. With Gaudi 3, it’s pointing to large-language-model (LLM) performance where it can claim outright superiority. But, looming in the background is Nvidia’s next GPU..

A new breed of AI-powered coding tools have emerged—and they’re claiming to be more autonomous versions of earlier assistants like GitHub Copilot, Amazon CodeWhisperer, and Tabnine.One such new entrant, Devin AI, has been dubbed an “AI software engineer” by its maker, applied AI lab Cognition. According to Cognition, Devin can perform all these tasks unassisted: build a website from scratch and deploy it, find and fix bugs in codebases, and even train and fine-tune its own large language model.Following its launch, open-source alternatives to Devin have cropped up, including Devika and OpenDevin. Meanwhile makers of established assistants have not been standing still. Researchers at ..

You can’t see, hear, taste, feel, or smell it, but software is everywhere around us. It underpins modern civilization even while consuming more energy, wealth, and time than it needs to and burping out a significant amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The software industry and the code it ships need to be much more efficient in order to minimize the emissions attributable to programs running in data centers and over transmission networks. Two approaches to software development featured in Spectrum‘s April 2024 issue can help us get there.In “Why Bloat Is Still Software’s Biggest Vulnerability,” Bert Hubert pays homage to the famed computer scientist and inventor of Pascal..

Sensors, controllers, and other electronic devices embedded in clothing could change the way we interact with computers and with each other. But efforts to turn T-shirts into electronic devices have been hampered by the need to power them with bulky batteries and process their data using stiff circuit boards.Research published today in Science shows that it doesn’t have to be that way. Textiles woven from high-tech layered fibers couple with the body to scavenge electromagnetic energy from the environment—batteries not included. The textiles can also act as simple sensors that are easy to read by eye, or they can beam out a wireless signal. The research team behind the fibers includes Ch..

Qubits, the fundamental component of every quantum computer, are currently very error-prone pieces of technology. What’s called fault-tolerant quantum computing could need 1,000 or more of such iffy “physical” qubits to yield just one potentially useful “logical” qubit. Now Microsoft and the quantum computing firm Quantinuum have announced a system that yields four logical qubits from just 30 physical qubits. Moreover, they say, these logical qubits display a record-setting 800-fold improvement in error rate compared with their component physical qubits. Microsoft announced today that a basic quantum circuit, involving comparisons of measurements A and B, above, was performed 14,00..

A sensor generates an electrical signal that depends on the physical quantity we aim to measure. Achieving the desired performance is an iterative process that begins with finding suitable materials, sensing methods, and control parameters. A complete toolset to characterize the prototype with efficient workflows is crucial to keep up with the project timelines. In this webinar, Kıvanç Esat and Jim Phillips present the measurement requirements, discuss the essential tools, and explain best practices with examples to accelerate your testing.You will learn:The essential measurement steps to find a sensor’s optimal operation conditions;Several control strategies, including Phase-locked Loop..

Liquid circuits that mimic synapses in the brain can for the first time perform the kind of logical operations underlying modern computers, a new study finds. Near-term applications for these devices may include tasks such as image recognition, as well as the kinds of calculations underlying most artificial intelligence systems.Just as biological neurons both compute and store data, brain-imitating neuromorphic technology often combines both operations. These devices may greatly reduce the energy and time lost in conventional microchips shuttling data back and forth between processors and memory. They may also prove ideal for implementing neural networks—AI systems increasingly finding use..

As transistors are made ever tinier to fit more computing power into a smaller footprint, they bump up against a big problem: quantum mechanics. Electrons get jumpy in small devices and leak out, which wastes energy while degrading performance. Now a team of researchers is showing that it doesn’t have to be that way. With careful engineering, it’s possible to turn electrons’ quantum behavior into an advantage.A team of English, Canadian, and Italian researchers have developed a single-molecule transistor that harnesses quantum effects. At low temperatures, the single-molecule device shows a strong change in current with only a small change in gate voltage, nearing a physical limit know..

In 1997 the IBM Deep Blue supercomputer defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov. It was a groundbreaking demonstration of supercomputer technology and a first glimpse into how high-performance computing might one day overtake human-level intelligence. In the 10 years that followed, we began to use artificial intelligence for many practical tasks, such as facial recognition, language translation, and recommending movies and merchandise.Fast-forward another decade and a half and artificial intelligence has advanced to the point where it can “synthesize knowledge.” Generative AI, such as ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion, can compose poems, create artwork, diagnose disease, write summary re..

Times change, and so must benchmarks. Now that we’re firmly in the age of massive generative AI, it’s time to add two such behemoths, Llama 2 70B and Stable Diffusion XL, to MLPerf’s inferencing tests. Version 4.0 of the benchmark tests more than 8,500 results from 23 submitting organizations. As has been the case from the beginning, computers with Nvidia GPUs came out on top, particularly those with its H200 processor. But AI accelerators from Intel and Qualcomm were in the mix as well. MLPerf started pushing into the LLM world last year when it added a text summarization benchmark GPT-J (a 6 billion parameter open-source model). With 70 billion parameters, Llama 2 is an order of mag..

Starting a new engineering program at a university is no simple task. But that’s just what Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., is doing. By 2026, the university will offer an undergraduate engineering degree—but without creating an engineering department. Instead, Brandeis aims to lean on its strong liberal arts tradition, in hope of offering something different from the more than 3,500 other engineering programs in the United States accredited by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET). IEEE Spectrum spoke with Seth Fraden, one of the new program’s interim cochairs, about getting a new engineering program up and running.What prompted offering an engineering de..

Software may be eating the world, but it is also heating it. In December 2023, representatives from nearly 200 countries gathered in Dubai for COP28, the U.N.’s climate-change conference, to discuss the urgent need to lower emissions. Meanwhile, COP28’s website produced 3.69 grams of carbon dioxide (CO2) per page load, according to the website sustainability scoring tool Ecograder. That appears to be a tiny amount, but if the site gets 10,000 views each month for a year, its emissions would be a little over that of a one-way flight from San Francisco to Toronto. This was not inevitable. Based on Ecograder’s analysis, unused code, improperly sized images, and third-party scripts, among..

Although recent findings have poured cold water on quantum computing hype, don’t count the technology out yet. On 4 March, Google and XPrize announced a US $5 million prize to anyone who comes up with use cases for quantum computers. If that sounds like an admission that use cases don’t already exist, it isn’t, says Ryan Babbush, head of quantum algorithms at Google. “We do know of some applications that these devices would be quite impactful for,” he says.“A quantum computer is a special purpose accelerator,” says Matthias Troyer, corporate vice president of Microsoft Quantum and member of the Xprize competition’s advisory board. “It can have a huge impact for special prob..

While the Top500 list ranks the 500 biggest high-performance computers (HPCs) in the world, its cousin the Green500 re-ranks the same 500 supercomputers according to their energy efficiency. For the last three iterations of the list, Henri—a small supercomputer operated by the Flatiron Institute in New York—has been named the world’s most energy efficient high-performance computer. Built in the fall of 2022, Henri was the first system to use Nvidia’s H100 GPU’s, aka Hopper. To learn the secrets of building and maintaining the most energy-efficient supercomputer, we caught up with Henri’s architect, Ian Fisk, who is co-director of the Scientific Computing Core at the Flatiron Ins..

Newly developed intrinsically stretchable circuits are thousands of times as fast as and possess 20 times as many transistors as previous intrinsically stretchable electronics. The researchers at Stanford University who developed the circuits have already demonstrated their use in a skin-like Braille-reading sensor array that they say is more sensitive than a human fingertip.In general, flexible electronics have potential for any application requiring interactions with soft materials, such as devices worn on or implanted within the body. Those applications could include on-skin computers, soft robotics, and brain-machine interfaces.However, conventional electronics are made of rigid material..

Today at Nvidia’s developer conference, GTC 2024, the company revealed its next GPU, the B200. The B200 is capable of delivering four times the training performance, up to 30 times the inference performance, and up to 25 times better energy efficiency, compared to its predecessor, the Hopper H100 GPU. Based on the new Blackwell architecture, the GPU can be combined with the company’s Grace CPUs to form a new generation of DGX SuperPOD computers capable of up to 11.5 billion billion floating point operations (exaflops) of AI computing using a new, low-precision number format.“Blackwell is a new class of AI superchip,” says Ian Buck, Nvidia’s vice president of high-performance comput..

The Chinese consumer electronics company TCL Technology recently unveiled a monstrous, 163-inch 4K Micro-LED television that one home theater expert described as “tall as Darth Vader.” Each of the TV’s 8.3 million pixels is an independent, miniscule LED, a feat for which TCL charges over $100,000. But here’s the real surprise: TCL’s new TV isn’t the most pixel-dense or exotic display ever produced. That honor goes to the emerging frontier of Micro-OLED and Micro-LED displays built for AR/VR headsets. Mojo Vision, a leader in micro-LED displays, recently demonstrated a full-color Micro-LED display frontplane with a density of 5,510 pixels per centimeter (14,000 pixels per inch) at..

Sunnyvale, Calif., AI supercomputer firm Cerebras says its next generation of waferscale AI chips can do double the performance of the previous generation while consuming the same amount of power. The Wafer Scale Engine 3 (WSE-3) contains 4 trillion transistors, a more than 50 percent increase over the previous generation thanks to the use of newer chipmaking technology. The company says it will use the WSE-3 in a new generation of AI computers, which are now being installed in a datacenter in Dallas to form a supercomputer capable of 8 exaflops (8 billion billion floating point operations per second). Separately, Cerebras has entered into a joint development agreement with Qualcomm that ai..

As wireless systems become complex and reach for more spectrum, RF engineers must rely on high-fidelity simulation solutions to model and test their proposed new networks effectively. We offer tools to address these challenges and enable network architects and mission planners to digitally model and simulate dynamic wireless networks within an accurate systems simulation environment. Leveraging solutions for electromagnetic wave propagation, electronically steered antenna design tools, and a digital mission simulation, engineers can rapidly deploy models and execute them within a high-fidelity, physics-accurate digital testing environment. Engineers will understand the impacts of terrain, u..

To reduce global warming and the associated effects, the transportation and energy sectors are adopting measures to make different applications potentially fossil free. This has led to a surge in demand for electric machines and the related design and development efforts. The designs of these electrical machines need to meet various specifications, including efficiency and power density requirements. A multiphysics-based simulation and modeling approach plays a critical role in accomplishing the design needs and significantly reducing the lead time to market.The COMSOL Multiphysics software and its add-on modules provide the capability needed to model the multiphysics phenomena involved in e..

Since ChatGPT dropped in the fall of 2022, everyone and their donkey has tried their hand at prompt engineering—finding a clever way to phrase your query to a large-language model (LLM) or AI art or video generator to get the best results or side-step protections. The internet is replete with prompt engineering guides, cheat sheets and advice threads to help you get the most out of an LLM.In the commercial sector, companies are now wrangling LLMs to build product co-pilots, automate tedious work, create personal assistants, and more, says Austin Henley, a former Microsoft employee who conducted a series of interviews with people developing LLM-powered co-pilots. “Every business is trying..

Stephen Cass: Hi. I’m Stephen Cass, a senior editor at IEEE Spectrum. And welcome to Fixing The Future, our bi-weekly podcast that focuses on concrete solutions to hard problems. Before we start, I want to tell you that you can get the latest coverage from some of Spectrum‘s most important beats, including AI, climate change, and robotics, by signing up for one of our free newsletters. Just go to spectrum.ieee.org/newsletters to subscribe.Today on Fixing The Future, we’re doing something a little different. Normally, we deep dive into exploring one topic, but that does mean that some really interesting things get left out for the podcast simply because they wouldn’t take up a whole ..

A microchip that uses light instead of electricity can potentially be faster and more energy-efficient at the complex computations essential to training AI than conventional electronics. In addition, researchers say the new chips may be significantly more secure against hacking.AI typically relies on neural networks in applications such as analyzing medical scans and supporting autonomous vehicles. In these systems, components known as neurons are fed data and cooperate to solve a problem, such as recognizing faces.As neural networks grow in size and power, they are becoming more energy hungry when run on conventional electronics. This has led some researchers to investigate optical computin..

Diversity of thought in industrial design is crucial: If no one thinks to design a technology for multiple body types, people can get hurt. The invention of seatbelts is an oft-cited example of this phenomenon, as they were designed based on crash dummies that had traditionally male proportions, reflecting the bodies of the team members working on them.The same phenomenon is now at work in the field of motion-capture technology. Throughout history, scientists have endeavored to understand how the human body moves. But how do we define the human body? Decades ago many studies assessed “healthy male” subjects; others used surprising models like dismembered cadavers. Even now, some modern s..

Last week at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), researchers introduced several technologies to fight even the sneakiest hack attacks. Engineers invented a way to detect a hacker placing a probe on the circuit board to attempt to read digital traffic in a computer. Other researchers invented new ways to obfuscate electromagnetic emissions radiating from an active processor that might reveal its secrets. Still other groups created new ways for chips to generate their own unique digital fingerprints, ensuring their authenticity. And if even those are compromised, one team came up with a chip-fingerprint self-destruct scheme.A Probe-Attack AlarmSome of the most difficult-..

Computers have grown more and more powerful over the decades by pushing the limits of how small their electronics can get. But just how big can a computer get? Could we turn a planet into a computer, and if so, what would we do with it? In considering such questions, we go beyond normal technological projections and into the realm of outright speculation. So IEEE Spectrum is making one of its occasional forays into science fiction, with a short story by Karl Schroeder about the unexpected outcomes from building a computer out of planet Mercury. Because we’re going much farther into the future than a typical Spectrum article does, we’ve contextualized and annotated Schroeder’s story ..

ChatGPT’s release on 30 Nov. 2022 was met with much fanfare and plenty of pushback. It quickly became clear people wanted to ask AI the same questions they asked Google—and ChatGPT often wasn’t capable of an answer. The problems were numerous. ChatGPT’s replies were out of date, didn’t cite sources, and frequently hallucinated new and inaccurate details. Emily Bender, director of The University of Washington’s Computational Linguistics Laboratory, was quoted at the time as saying that AI search was “The Star Trek fantasy, where you have this all-knowing computer that you can ask questions.”Perplexity initially hoped to build an AI-powered Text-to-SQL tool. But something diffe..

A novel disc the size of a DVD can hold more than 1 million gigabits—roughly as much as is transmitted per second over the entire world’s Internet—by storing data in three dimensions as opposed to two, a new study finds.Optical discs such as CDs and DVDs encode data using a series of microscopic pits. These pits, and the islands between them, together represent the 0s and 1s of binary code that computers use to symbolize information. CD, DVD, and Blu-Ray players use lasers to read the data encoded in these discs.“The use of ultra-high density optical data storage technology in big data centers is now possible.” —Min Gu, University of Shanghai for Science and TechnologyAlthough op..