Jennifer Gaudioso, director of the Sandia National Laboratory’s Center for Computing Research, emphasized during her testimony the role that DOE’s national labs could have in both accelerating computing capacity and helping support advances in AI technology. She pointed to her own lab’s work in securing the U.S. nuclear arsenal — and the national labs’ historical role in promoting high-performance computing. 

“Doing AI at the frontier and at scale is crucial for maintaining competitiveness and solving complex global challenges,“ Gaudioso said. “Breakthroughs in one area beget discoveries in others.”

Gaudioso also noted the importance of building AI systems based on more advanced data than the internet-based sources used to build systems like ChatGPT. That includes government datasets, she added.

“What I get really excited about is the transformative potential of training models on science data,” she said. “We can then do new manufacturing. We can make digital twins of the human body to take drug discovery from decades down to months. Maybe 100 days for the next vaccine.” 

The national labs’ current work on artificial intelligence includes AI and nuclear deterrence, national security, non-proliferation, and advanced science and technology, Gaudioso shared. She also referenced the Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence for Science, Security and Technology — a DOE effort focused on using supercomputing for AI. The FASST initiative was announced last month. 

Last November, FedScoop reported on how the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee was preparing its supercomputing resources — including the world’s fastest supercomputer, Frontier — for AI work. 

Tuesday’s hearing follows the White House’s continued promotion of new AI-focused policies, and as Congress mulls legislation focused on both regulating and incubating artificial intelligence

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The National Science Board is responsible for establishing a strategic framework for the work of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and approving its budget submission. Members of the board also serve as an independent body of advisors to the president and Congress on science-and-technology policy matters.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory materials scientist Merlin Theodore is set to join the NSB, along with Ohio State University professor and satellite expert Dorota A. Grejner-Brzezinska.

Other appointments to the board include University of Michigan education professor Deborah Loewenberg Ball and geneticist Vicki Chandler.

The Biden administration said also that it will name Boeing Company Director of Engineering Marvi Ann Matos Rodriguez and astronomer Keivan Stassun to the advisory body.

Executive Associate Chancellor Wanda Elaine Ward of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Bevlee Watford, professor of engineering education at Virginia Tech, will also join the panel.

The NSB is made up of 25 members, which are appointed by the president, and each member serves a six-year term on the board.

Last year, the Biden administration named two scientists to the NSB, Victor McCrary Jr. and Julia Philips. McCrary is the vice president for research and graduate programs at the University of the District of Columbia, and Phillips is a materials physicist and was previously vice president and chief technology officer at the Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico.

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McCrary is the vice president for research and graduate programs at the University of the District of Columbia, where his team leads the growth and oversight of the university’s research enterprise. He returns to the board after serving on it during the Obama administration and has held several other research leadership positions including at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Morgan State University and the University of Tennessee.

Phillips is a materials physicist and was previously vice president and chief technology officer at the Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico. She retired in 2015 but remains an executive emeritus at the laboratories, and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 

The National Science Board establishes the policies of the National Science Foundation and serves as an adviser to Congress and the president. 

The board also approves major NSF awards, provides congressional testimony and issues statements relevant to the nation’s science and engineering enterprise. The president is able to appoint up to 24 members to the board, each for a term of six years. 

The appointments come as the White House earlier today signed a national security memorandum that is intended to confront risks associated with future quantum technologies with help from federal agencies, academia and the private sector.

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The testbed will connect quantum computers between Berkeley Lab and the University of California, Berkeley with the help of the California Institute of Technology while integrating a distributed quantum computing application.

The Quantum Application Network Testbed (QUANT-NET) would advance the nationwide quantum internet blueprint drawn up in New York City in February 2020 and the National Quantum Initiative more broadly, with recent DOE funding for quantum information science projects.

“A testbed seemed more synergistic because I’m doing practical networking for the Department of Energy, so I’m not on the physics or the device or the materials side of research,” Inder Monga, executive director of the Science Networking Division and ESnet at Berkeley Lab, told FedScoop. “I’m more on: How do we operationalize new ideas?”

Commercialization of quantum internet remains a way off, so it made sense to accelerate the work of physicists and other researchers with the help of academia and industry, Monga said.

Quantum networks encode more information than traditional computing with implications for quantum sensing, metrology and distributed quantum computing. The last application is the one Berkeley Lab hopes to demonstrate, but it remains theoretical as the algorithms don’t exist.

“These demonstrations will require seamless integration of a host of different technologies ranging from quantum information processing with trapped ions, color centers and superconducting systems to ultra-highly efficient conversion of quantum information from atoms to light and routing it through a fiber network,” said Hartmut Häffner, associate professor of physics at UC Berkeley, in a statement. “We envision that this work will pave the way toward a quantum internet for quantum communication applications and allow us to connect different quantum computers to create larger and more powerful ones.”

Despite its assistance, Caltech won’t be connected to the network due to the proximity issue. Signal photons can’t yet be sent and directed over long distances without a quantum repeater, which hasn’t yet been developed.

Berkeley Lab’s latest system ESnet has 309 locations where optical amplifiers help create a nationwide network, but those amplify light and not single photons, which is necessary for quantum networking. While the lab might not succeed, it hopes to develop a quantum repeater before its five years of funding runs out, Monga said.

Currently a number of homegrown devices exist to address physics challenges and synergies within quantum computing, and a perk of a testbed is it’s not tied to one device or technology. Berkeley Lab intends to leverage the best technology available from the National Science Foundation; University of Arizona; startups like PsiQuantum in Palo Alto, California, and Aliro in Brighton, Massachusetts; and NASA‘s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

However pandemic-related supply chain delays might just be the testbed’s biggest hurdle, Monga added.

On the digital networking side, getting servers takes six months — even general purpose commodity servers. And some parts can only be procured from Sandia National Labs or small startups launched by university professors.

“Some of these are very specialized,” Monga said. “You need ion traps and quantum computing components, and I don’t have insight into how good the supply is and whether things will be delayed beyond what we have planned for in contingency.”

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Lewis Rhodes Labs unveiled Monday what it is calling a “Cyber Microscope,” which places the first general purpose neuromorphic processor (NPU) on a PCI Express graphics card for use in open source incident detection systems, giving threat analysts the ability to root through signatures 100 times faster than current state-of-the-art systems.

The sizable increase in speed comes from the processor, which works differently than a traditional CPU. Most computers start with a very powerful processor that can run thousands of computations at a time while disseminating bits over a flat memory architecture. Neuromorphic processors work in an opposite way, with a very simple processor that works with extremely complex memory. These artificial neural networks are often used in large-scale research projects, such as the White House’s BRAIN initiative.

What Lewis Rhodes Labs has done is taken this NPU, combined with a programming compiler that translates data into a language the processor can understand, and placed it underneath intrusion detection system software, like Suricata and Snort. Users then can look through vast amounts of threat data, combing through signatures at speeds never before seen and levels that allow them to weed out false positives to determine what’s a threat and what’s merely noise.

“It profoundly changes the size, the weight, the power, the cost of be able to explore data for various threats that exist,” CEO David Follett told FedScoop.

Sandia National Labs has been using the cyber microscopes since last September, when their cyber development team analyzed more than 800 complex PCRE signatures at a 2 Gb/s rate, more than 100 times faster than was currently available on the market.

“The improved speed and accuracy of the cyber microscope should allow us to dramatically reduce the false positive rate in our alert database, and we are collaboratively researching methods to use the temporal nature of the neuromorphic processor to detect novel behavioral variants,” said John Zepper, director of systems mission engineering at Sandia National Laboratories.

The cyber microscope was created out of models used when Lewis Rhodes Labs’ co-founder Dr. Pamela Follett was conducting research on developmental diseases in children. Follett, a pediatric neurologist, physician and neuroscientist, developed a model in rats that was used to determine the causes of cerebral palsy.

“What we did was then write a computer model that simulated how information was processed in the brain,” David Follett told FedScoop. “Then we could injure the model based on what she had learned from the rat model, and how that injury resulted in a change of cognitive function.

They soon both realized their computer model could be applied outside medical research, for everything from cybersecurity to robotics control to image and video processing.

“We sat down with folks at Sandia and said let’s match this to various missions and see what happens,” Follett said.

Lewis Rhodes Labs plans to roll out the initial version of its microscope on programmable processors, on which further iterations are being loaded on application-specific integrated circuits similar to the way hardware is built for Bitcoin mining.

The microscope will cost $20,000, which Follett said is a fraction of the cost compared to the power needed in current state-of-the-art systems to perform the same kind of analysis.

“Instead of having to write these very broad expressions, you can be very, very precise in what you are looking for,” Follett told FedScoop. “The bottom line result is you enrich the data that the analysts are going to have to deal with it. It’s a much more target-rich environment, and that’s where the big impact comes from.”

Contact the reporter on this story via email at greg.otto@fedscoop.com, or follow him on Twitter at @gregotto. His OTR and PGP info can be found here. Subscribe to the Daily Scoop for stories like this in your inbox every morning by signing up here: fdscp.com/sign-me-on.

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