Nvidia Tops Llama 2, Stable Diffusion Speed Trials

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..

IEEE Spectrum : Computing Nvidia Tops Llama 2, Stable Diffusion Speed Trials

How to Boot Up a New Engineering Program

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..

IEEE Spectrum : Computing How to Boot Up a New Engineering Program

We Need to Decarbonize Software

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..

IEEE Spectrum : Computing We Need to Decarbonize Software

Here Are 6 Actual Uses for Near-Term Quantum Computers

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..

IEEE Spectrum : Computing Here Are 6 Actual Uses for Near-Term Quantum Computers

Supercomputing’s Future Is Green and Interconnected

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..

IEEE Spectrum : Computing Supercomputing’s Future Is Green and Interconnected

Stretchy Circuits Break Records for Flexible Electronics

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..

IEEE Spectrum : Computing Stretchy Circuits Break Records for Flexible Electronics

Nvidia Unveils Blackwell, Its Next GPU

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..

IEEE Spectrum : Computing Nvidia Unveils Blackwell, Its Next GPU

VR Headsets Are Approaching the Eye’s Resolution Limits

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..

IEEE Spectrum : Computing VR Headsets Are Approaching the Eye’s Resolution Limits

Cerebras Unveils Its Next Waferscale AI Chip

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..

IEEE Spectrum : Computing Cerebras Unveils Its Next Waferscale AI Chip

Wireless Channel Modeling for Dynamic Terrestrial Environments

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..

IEEE Spectrum : Computing Wireless Channel Modeling for Dynamic Terrestrial Environments

Multiphysics Modeling of Electrical Motors

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..

IEEE Spectrum : Computing Multiphysics Modeling of Electrical Motors

AI Prompt Engineering Is Dead

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..

IEEE Spectrum : Computing AI Prompt Engineering Is Dead

Lean Software, Power Electronics, and the Return of Optical Storage

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 ..

IEEE Spectrum : Computing Lean Software, Power Electronics, and the Return of Optical Storage

Faster, More Secure Photonic Chip Boosts AI Training

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..

IEEE Spectrum : Computing Faster, More Secure Photonic Chip Boosts AI Training

AI Is Being Built on Dated, Flawed Motion-Capture Data

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..

IEEE Spectrum : Computing AI Is Being Built on Dated, Flawed Motion-Capture Data

Self-Destructing Circuits and More Security Schemes

Last week at the IEEE 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 diffi..

IEEE Spectrum : Computing Self-Destructing Circuits and More Security Schemes

Science Fiction Short: Hijack

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 ..

IEEE Spectrum : Computing Science Fiction Short: Hijack

Perplexity.ai Revamps Google SEO Model For LLM Era

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..

IEEE Spectrum : Computing Perplexity.ai Revamps Google SEO Model For LLM Era

DVD’s New Cousin Can Store More Than a Petabit

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..

IEEE Spectrum : Computing DVD’s New Cousin Can Store More Than a Petabit

High-performance Data Acquisition for DFOS

Join us for an insightful webinar on high-speed data acquisition in the context of Distributed Fiber Optic Sensing (DFOS) and learn more about the critical role that high-performance digitizers play in maximizing the potential of DFOS across diverse applications. The webinar is co-hosted by Professor Aldo Minardo, University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli, who will speak about his phi-OTDR DAS system based on Teledyne SP Device’s 14-bit ADQ7DC digitizer.Register now for this free webinar!

IEEE Spectrum : Computing High-performance Data Acquisition for DFOS

Analog Computers May Work Better Using Spin Than Light

In collaborative research out of Japan and Switzerland, scientists have taken an important step towards a next generation of analog computers by creating new types of logic gates based on spin waves. Spin waves are the waves generated when all the electrons in a system shift the alignment of their spins in one direction and at the same time.“Both practically and in terms of research, there’s a higher potential to achieve analog computing more affordably using spin-wave technology compared to other wave-based approaches.” —Taichi Goto, Tohoku UniversityWhen reconsidering the promise of analog computers—for new kinds of super-efficient AI and new directions in conventional computing,..

IEEE Spectrum : Computing Analog Computers May Work Better Using Spin Than Light

Alibaba and Baidu Cash Out on Quantum Computing Stakes

Chinese tech giants Alibaba and Baidu have pulled out of the quantum computing race after shutting down their research units just over a month apart from each other. But experts say it would be premature to read this as any marked cooling of China’s overall interest in quantum computing. Last November, the e-commerce and cloud computing behemoth Alibaba announced that it was shuttering its quantum computing research lab and donating all of its equipment to Zhejiang University in Hangzhou. Then in January, leading search provider Baidu followed suit, offloading its research facility to the Beijing Academy of Quantum Information Sciences (BAQIS). “There are so few private sector players in..

IEEE Spectrum : Computing Alibaba and Baidu Cash Out on Quantum Computing Stakes

100 Years Ago, IBM Was Born

Happy birthday, IBM! You’re 100 years old! Or are you?It’s true that the businesses that formed IBM began in the late 1800s. But it’s also true that a birth occurred in February 1924, with the renaming of the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Co. as the International Business Machines Corp. And a hundred years after that event, it serves as an important reminder that the world of computing and IT that IBM played a pivotal role in building has a longer history than we are likely to think. “Data processing” was coined over a century ago, while “office appliance” was in use in the 1880s. From the 19th century, through the 20th, and into the 21st, IBM was there, making HP, Microsoft, ..

IEEE Spectrum : Computing 100 Years Ago, IBM Was Born

Open-Source Security Chip Released

The first commercial silicon chip that includes open-source, built-in hardware security was announced today by the OpenTitan coalition.This milestone represents another step in the growth of the open hardware movement. Open hardware has been gaining steam since the development of the popular open-source processor architecture RISC-V RISC-V gives an openly available prescription for a how a computer can operate efficiently at the most basic level. OpenTitan goes beyond RISC-V’s open-source instruction set by delivering an open-source design for the silicon itself. Although other open-source silicon has been developed, this is the first one to include the design verification stage and to pro..

IEEE Spectrum : Computing Open-Source Security Chip Released

Why Bloat Is Still Software’s Biggest Vulnerability

This post is dedicated to the memory of Niklaus Wirth, a computing pioneer who passed away 1 January 2024. In 1995 he wrote an influential article called “A Plea for Lean Software,” published in Computer, the magazine for members of the IEEE Computer Society, which I read early in my career as an entrepreneur and software developer. In what follows, I try to make the same case nearly 30 years later, updated for today’s computing horrors. A version of this post was originally published on my personal blog, Berthub.eu.Some years ago I did a talk at a local university on cybersecurity, titled “Cyber and Information Security: Have We All Gone Mad?” It is still worth reading today since..

IEEE Spectrum : Computing Why Bloat Is Still Software’s Biggest Vulnerability

Standards Matter for Cars, Plugs, WiFi—and AI?

Artificial intelligence holds much promise for innovation and progress, but it also has the potential to cause harm. To enable the responsible development and use of AI, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) recently released ISO/IEC 42001, a new standard for AI management systems. According to ISO, this standard “offers organizations the comprehensive guidance they need to use AI responsibly and effectively, even as the technology is rapidly evolving.”As AI has rapidly matured and broadly been rolled out across the world, there’s been a tangle of conflicting standards from big AI companies like Meta, Microsoft, and Google. (Although in November, Meta reportedly disb..

IEEE Spectrum : Computing Standards Matter for Cars, Plugs, WiFi—and AI?

Cool(ing) Ideas for Tropical Data Centers

Tropical climates could make racks of hot-running data servers even hotter. But researchers in Singapore are now testing ways to cool this trend, sustainably. The National University of Singapore in Queenstown (NUS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTUS), together with Singapore’s National Research Foundation and Infocomm Media Development Authority, as well as 20 IT companies, have collaborated to establish the industry’s first data center testbed for tropical climates. Dubbed the Sustainable Tropical Data Centre Testbed (STDCT), the research facility occupies a floor area of 770 square meters in NUS and officially opened its door for business in November, after the idea wa..

IEEE Spectrum : Computing Cool(ing) Ideas for Tropical Data Centers

Compact Spinning Tech Makes Thermal Imaging Bright

Seeing heat, as a cutting-edge field of research today, is getting hotter. Purdue University researchers have merged the power of advanced surfaces (including metamaterials) with thermal imaging algorithms to create technology that could open new frontiers in machine vision and autonomous systems.Previously, such advanced surfaces had been used for imaging tech in the visible spectrum. However, using these frontier technologies for infrared thermal imaging has remained largely unexplored until now.“The robustness of the device and its simplicity significantly enhance its practicality for real-world applications.” –Xueji Wang, Purdue UniversityThe Purdue team have dubbed their device th..

IEEE Spectrum : Computing Compact Spinning Tech Makes Thermal Imaging Bright

MIT and IBM Find Clever AI Ways Around Brute-Force Math

Since the days of Isaac Newton, the fundamental laws of nature—optics, acoustics, engineering, electronics—all ultimately reduce to a vital, broad set of equations. Now researchers have found a new way to use brain-inspired neural networks to solve these equations significantly more efficiently than before for numerous potential applications in science and engineering.In modern science and engineering, partial differential equations help model complex physical systems involving multiple rates of change, such as ones changing across both space and time. They can help model everything from the flow of air past the wings of an airplane to the spreading of a pollutant in the air to the colla..

IEEE Spectrum : Computing MIT and IBM Find Clever AI Ways Around Brute-Force Math

Infrared Sensors Can Now Peer Around Corners

Just because an object is around a corner doesn’t mean it has to be hidden. Non-line-of-sight imaging can peek around corners and spot those objects, but it has so far been limited to a narrow band of frequencies. Now a new sensor can help extend this technique from working with visible light to infrared. This advance could prove help make autonomous vehicles safer, among other potential applications.Non-line-of-sight imaging relies on the faint signals of light beams that have reflected off of surfaces in order to reconstruct images. The ability to see around corners may prove useful for machine vision—for instance, helping autonomous vehicles foresee hidden dangers to better predict ho..

IEEE Spectrum : Computing Infrared Sensors Can Now Peer Around Corners