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Director Of The World’s Fastest Supercomputer Explains How They Did It

Lead Image: The Frontier supercomputer. OLCF at ORNL The world’s fastest supercomputer — called Frontier — is whizzing away in a national lab located in the foothills of East Tennessee. It’s the only machine in the world that has ever demonstrated that it could perform more than one quintillion (that’s 1,000,000,000,000,000,000) calculations per second. In the language of computer science, that’s called an exaflop. Frontier’s project leader, Justin Whitt, told IE that his favorite way to explain the scale of his team’s achievement is to imagine if every single person on Earth could pull out a pen and paper and do one…

What Has Happened To The World’s Nuclear test sites?

Lead Image: An Artist’s impression of a nuclear blast on a city and the wave of destruction thereof. Nuclear Weapons are the pinnacle of our species’ ingenuity for large-scale devastation. While large proportions of their development could occur on paper and under lab conditions, the time soon came when real bombs would need to be field-tested. To this end, most of today’s nuclear powers have conducted hundreds of nuclear tests in various remote locations worldwide, taking place over decades. Thankfully, most of this testing ceased entirely in the late 1990s, with countries like India, China, and Pakistan not detonating another…

“Viral Dark Matter” Could Help Mitigate Climate Change – Here’s How

Lead Image: Recently scientists uncovered a treasure trove of new data about RNA viruses in the ocean including 5,500 new RNA virus species. Analysis suggests that a small portion of them had “stolen” genes from organisms they infected, which helps identify their functions in marine processes. Several may help drive carbon absorbed from the atmosphere to permanent storage on the ocean floor. Study identifies 1,200+ RNA viruses with connections to carbon flux. Many scientists believe that climate change is a significant threat and that we are running out of time left to act. On top of that, new research shows…

Mastodon Killed in Bloody Battle 13,200 Years Ago – Reveals Extinct Animal’s Annual Migration

Lead Image: University of Michigan paleontologist Daniel Fisher with a mounted skeleton of the Buesching mastodon, based on casts of individual bones produced in fiberglass, on public display at the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History in Ann Arbor. Credit: Eric Bronson, Michigan Photography Mastodons are relatives of elephants belonging to the genus Mammut that inhabited North and Central America before they went extinct about 10,000 to 11,000 years ago. Typical adults stood between 8 and 10 feet (2.5-3 m) tall at the shoulder and weighed around 8,000 to 12,000 pounds (3,600-5,400 kg). The largest specimen found was 10.7…

Astronomers Discover a Nearby Multiplanet System With Two Earth-Sized Planets

Lead Image: MIT astronomers have discovered a new multiplanet system that lies just 10 parsecs, or about 33 light-years, from Earth, making it one of the closest known multiplanet systems to our own. The star at the heart of the system likely hosts at least two terrestrial, Earth-sized planets. Credit: MIT News, with TESS Satellite figure courtesy of NASA Located just 33 light years from Earth, the system appears to host two rocky, Earth-sized planets. A new multiplanet system within our galactic neighborhood has been discovered by astronomers at MIT and elsewhere. It lies just 10 parsecs, or about 33…