Consortium Aims to Standardize Chiplet Interconnect

The US government recently stood up a consortium of six Washington D.C.-based federal agencies to explore a range of quantum technologies necessary to create, demonstrate, and operate DC-QNet, a regional, multi-kilometer quantum network testbed. The six participating agencies span a range of US government mission agencies including the National Security Agency, the US Naval Research Laboratory, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The program targets key underlying technologies needed to implement a metro[1]area quantum network that includes high-fidelity quantum memory, single photon devices, and related network metrology as well as mechanisms to support quantum entanglement between network nodes in a quantum computer. Details about project schedule and budget have not yet been made available, but each participating agency will be responsible for funding its research activities.

Recently, the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) trained the first large artificial intelligence (AI) model designed to understand, speak, and write in the Spanish language. The system, named MarIA, was trained on the MareNostrum supercomputer at the BSC, leveraging 59 TBs of language data from the Biblioteca Nacional de España, one of the world's largest public libraries. The model is said to be an expert in both writing and understanding the Spanish language and is free to use by any developer, company, or entity. The system has a wide variety of potential applications including summarization applications, chatbots, smart searches, translation engines, and automatic subtitling chatbots.