PRACE (the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe) welcomed the third Tier-0 system for the PRACE Research Infrastructure. The next supercomputer at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, Bavaria, Germany (Leibniz-Rechenzentrum, LRZ)  part of the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS) 'SuperMUC' was signed for in December.

SuperMUC will start operation in mid 2012 and be one of the fastest general purpose supercomputers in the world with 3 Petaflop/s peak performance, 320 TeraBytes main memory and 12 PetaBytes permanent storage. It has a new cooling concept and be very energy efficient.



"With this system, PRACE will increase its overall Tier-0 capability by more than 5x since the creation if the infrastructure in 2010", said Dr. Thomas Eickermann, PRACE project manager (Forschungzentrum Jülich)

Although SuperMUC will be comprised of more than 110,000 processor cores, stable operation and excellent scaling are expected due to its architecture. Scientists will be able to use their established programming models without changes on this new supercomputer. Using the PRACE Research Infrastructure, SuperMUC offers new possibilities for scientists from 20 European PRACE member states.



The new cooling concept is revolutionary. Active memory and processor components are directly cooled with water that can have a temperature of up to 45^o Celsius. This 'High Temperature Liquid Cooling' and innovative system software enable an only very moderate increase in energy needed to operate this system.

In addition, all LRZ buildings will be heated re-using this energy.

 Investment costs for SuperMUC - operational costs and 5 to 6 years power, are €83m, funded jointly by State of Bavaria and Germany -  as is the additional €50m for the extension of LRZ's buildings. Bavaria will support accompanying projects in high performance computing.

GaAs take on quantum
Scientists at Hitachi Cambridge Laboratory of Hitachi Europe along with the University of Cambridge, University of Nottingham, Institute of Physics of the Academy of Sciences  and Charles University of the Czech Republic, andTexas A&M University in the US, have developed a new technique using gallium-arsenide semiconductor material reports Techeye.net.



Electronic devices such as information processing, semiconductor, storage and power devices which have been the driving force in industry, social infrastructure, lifestyle and science advancement in the 20th century, and based on detecting the “charge” of an electron.
 
Joerg Wunderlich, who heads the research team at Hitachi Cambridge Laboratory, this has not moved on.  The new science and technology field of spintronics is based on another basic attribute of an electronthe elementary magnetic movement  of 'spin.'

Wunderlich is on record that "The research into the new spinning began in 2005, when scientists realised they were able to measure separately an up and down spin at an extremely low temperature of -269C using a gallium-arsenide  non-magnetic semiconductor material."



Adding that in 2009 the same GaAs semiconductor was used at a temperature of -53C, by measuring the flow of spin polarised current over a distance of a few microns.

 

"In the current development, up or down spin was controlled by a gate voltage, and the ON/OFF operation as a transistor verified," he added. 

"In this development, a circularly polarised light 4 was used to generate pure spin current in the semiconductor.

When spin-injection technology for ferromagnetic material is developed in future, all-solid spintronics devices will be achieved. And 

he added further technology will also help researchers to use a solid device which can control and detect the polarisation of the light opening the way for even larger capacity information transmission systems.

Wunderlich said that the technology, which is still in its "early stages" will be used by Hitachi as well as other companies.

InAs approach to quantum and spintronics
Scientists from the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at Delft University of Technology and Eindhoven University of Technology can now control the building blocks of a future super-fast quantum computer, being able to manipulate qubits with electrical rather than magnetic fields, as has been the common practice up till now.

They have also been able to embed the qubits into indium arsenide semiconductor nanowires. Spin-Orbit qubit in a semiconductor nanowire is published in Nature. 
   
(Left) Artist’s impression of nanowire qubits. 
The qubit is the building block of a possible, future ultrafast quantum computer. One way to make a qubit is to trap a single electron in semiconductor material. A qubit can, just like a normal computer bit, adopt the states ‘0’ and ‘1’. This is achieved by using the spin of an electron, generated by spinning the electron on its axis in two directions (for the ‘0’ and ‘1’ states).

 
Until now, the spin of an electron has been controlled by magnetic fields. However, these are extremely difficult to generate on a chip. electron spin in the qubits currently being generated by the Dutch scientists can be controlled by a charge or an electric field.

This form of control has major advantages, as Leo Kouwenhoven  (right) scientist at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at TU Delft, points out: "These spin-orbit qubits combine the best of both worlds. They employ the advantages of both electronic control and information storage in the electron spin."

The Dutch scientists have been able to embed the qubits into nanowires made of a indium arsenide material. 

(LEFT: Scanning electron micrograph of the nanowire device with gate electrodes used to electrically control qubits, source and drain electrodes used to probe qubit states. Wires are of  nanometre diameter, micrometres in length.)

"These are being increasingly used as convenient building blocks in nanoelectronics. Nanowires are an excellent platform for quantum information processing, among other applications," says Kouwenhoven.