Why the US refused to let Intel update China's super computer
A multi-million dollar deal was cut short today, when Intel was prevented from updating China's super computer. The country's national computing association turned to the tech giant for help updating their system. Unfortunately, the US refused to give any help to China due to the fact they suspected China was using the system for nuclear research.
Intel applied for a licence to export tens of thousands of chips to update the Tianhe-2 computer. The Department of Commerce refused, saying it was concerned about nuclear research being done with the machine. The Tianhe-2 uses 80,000 Intel Xeon chips to generate a computational capacity of more than 33 petaflops. A petaflop is equal to about one quadrillion calculations per second. This year the Chinese machine was due to undergo a series of upgrades to boost its number-crunching abilities past 110 petaflops. Full story: Here
Scientists create the ultimate battery
In science news, researchers have managed to create a flexible aluminium based battery, which they is safer and more reliable than ever. The researchers say it has advantages over lithium-ion batteries, for example they made this statement "We have developed a rechargeable aluminium battery that may replace existing storage devices, such as alkaline batteries, which are bad for the environment, and lithium-ion batteries, which occasionally burst into flames," Hopefully this new type of battery will catch on soon. Full story here:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-32204707
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