China Science & Technology Forum

[cirr]

China to get a third telescope for Antarctic observations

2017-11-13 08:44 Global Times Editor: Li Yan

China will add a third Antarctic Survey Telescope (AST3) to the South Pole array for observing gravitational waves, and introduce more equipment for its observation work, Chinese scientists said on Sunday.

The AST3-3 telescope is expected to be installed on China's next round of Antarctic scientific investigation at the Kunlun Station, Wu Xuefeng, a research fellow with the Chinese Academy of Sciences Purple Mountain Observatory, told the Global Times on Sunday.

Wu added that the AST3 team will take part in global cooperation to better observe gravitational waves.

"Gravitational waves offer a new method for astronomers and, when this is combined with traditional approaches, such as optical and electromagnetic waves, more data on the universe can be discovered," Chen Xuelei, a research fellow at CAS' National Astronomical Observatories, previously told the Global Times.

Gravitational waves were first discovered by the US's Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory detectors in August. China's AST3-2 observed optical signals, in a separate study, the following day, according to the Chinese Center for Antarctic Astronomy.

This was the first time for humans to have detected gravitational waves and corresponding electromagnetic phenomena resulting from a binary neutron star merger, the Xinhua News Agency reported.

China's AST3-2 observed optical signals resulting from a merger the following day, with some 70 telescopes on the ground or in space around the world, China's Center for Antarctic Astronomy said.

As the equipment used to detect gravitational waves becomes more accurate, more optical counterparts of gravitational waves will be detected, said Wu.

The AST3 is at Dome A, Antarctica, which is uniquely situated for rapid response time-domain astronomy with continuous night-time coverage during the austral winter.

It was installed at Kunlun Station in 2015. The second Chinese Antarctic Survey Telescope, AST3-2, is the largest visible telescope in the Antarctic, operating in a fully automatic control mode for the observation of different scientific targets.

http://www.ecns.cn/2017/11-13/280625.shtml

 

[JSCh]

China fires up next-generation neutron-science facility
Beam generator puts country in elite company for doing experiments in materials science and other fields.

• David Cyranoski
• 14 November 2017

Jin Liwang/Xinhua via ZUMAPRESS​

Engineers work on an instrument at the China Spallation Neutron Source in Dongguan.

China is revving up its next-generation neutron generator and will soon start experiments there. That will lift the country into a select group of nations with facilities that produce intense neutron beams to study the structure of materials.

The China Spallation Neutron Source (CSNS) in Dongguan, a 2.2-billion-yuan (US$331-million) centre, will allow the country’s growing pool of top-notch physicists and material scientists, along with international collaborators, to compete in multiple physics and engineering fields. Its designers also hope that the facility will lead to commercial products and applications ranging from batteries and bridges to aeroplane engines and cancer therapy.

“It is not only a big step forward for Chinese scientists, but also a significant event for the international scientist community,” says Wang Xun-Li, a physicist at the City University of Hong Kong who has been involved in planning the facility.

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More related stories

Beam bombardment
Spallation neutron sources produce neutrons by slamming protons onto a metal target — CSNS uses tungsten. They are more cost effective and safer than other methods, which use nuclear reactors to produce neutron beams. As neutrons have no charge, they can penetrate materials more easily than some other probing methods, and they are more senstive to light elements such as hydrogen, making them useful for evaluating candidate materials for fuel cells. Similar facilities exist only in the United Kingdom, United States, Japan and Switzerland, and one is under construction in Sweden.

Fujio Maekawa, a specialist in neutron sources at the Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex in Tokaimura, says that although the CSNS delivers neutrons at a lower density than other spallation sources — which means that experiments will take longer — a planned upgrade will bring it in line with other facilities. And given their scarcity, “neutron users around the world always welcome new sources”, he says.

The CSNS will have capacity to host 20 beam lines, supplying as many instruments. Preliminary tests of its first three instruments began on 1 November. “Neutrons arrived at the samples as expected,” says Wang Fangwei, head of the neutron-science division at CSNS. Although debugging might take a couple of years, he expects the instruments to be calibrated and ready for initial experiments by the end of 2017.

Chinese physicists are eager to use the facility to analyse the underlying magnetic properties of materials, an area in which the country has significant experience. Wang Xun-Li says that several planned instruments will give scientists the chance to move to the forefront of fields such as the physics of skyrmions — vortex-like excitations in magnetic materials — and high-temperature superconductivity. “There are a whole bunch of early- to mid-career scientists who are hungry to use the facility for studying magnetism,” says Wang Xun-Li.

Global appeal
Wang Xun-Li thinks that the latest facility will encourage Chinese researchers to remain in the country instead of pursuing careers elsewhere. “In the past, it was common to see Chinese scientists go abroad for these kinds of studies,” he says.

The facility’s first instruments are also attracting international researchers. German material scientist Frank Klose says that the CSNS was a major factor when he and material scientist Christine Rehm, his wife, decided to join the new Guangdong Technion Israel Institute of Technology in Shantou, 400 kilometres east of Dongguan. Klose’s research focuses on designing data-storage devices and sensors that could be used in hydrogen-powered cars. He helped design one of the facility's instruments to investigate the magnetic properties of spintronic devices, which take advantage of the spin of electrons to store data.

But scientists contacted by Nature have raised concerns about CSNS’s location, saying that Dongguan lacks services and infrastructure, such as schools and universities, that will persuade top scientists and their families to move there. “I believe CSNS is suffering from a lack of first-grade scientists who actually are based in Dongguan,” says a researcher familiar with the facility, who asked for anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. Potential users have also expressed some frustration that only 3 instruments will be ready this year, despite the facility’s capacity to host 20.

But more instruments are already being built. Shenzhen's government is funding two that are expected to be ready by the end of 2019, including one designed to model high-pressure environments, such as the Earth's core. Mao Ho-Kwang, a geophysicist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington DC, is keen to use it to simulate what happens to materials in high-pressure conditions. “The CSNS instruments will be a great asset for Earth, environmental and energy science, as well as physics, chemistry and material science,” says Mao. “I am very excited, and the whole neutron community is getting very excited too”.

Nature 551, 284 (16 November 2017)
doi:10.1038/nature.2017.22976​

China fires up next-generation neutron-science facility : Nature News & Comment

 

[Bussard Ramjet]

A recent paper in Physical Review Letters, published on 13th November.

It is marked as Editor's Suggestion.

https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.200501

Man! @JSCh

Pan Jianwei is a real rockstar!

 

[Bussard Ramjet]

A recent paper in Physical Review Letters, published on 13th November.

It is marked as Editor's Suggestion.

https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.200501

Man! @JSCh

Pan Jianwei is a real rockstar!

Infact the biggest thing, about Pan Jianwei, and indeed all top scientists is not only their own research.

It is the fact that they can attract a huge amount of extremely high quality talent to work with them.

Lu Chaoyang is a young scientist in the same field, who will be the Pan Jianwei of the next generation from China, and he may not have come if for Pan Jianwei.

Similarly, the scientists and students being trained in these labs are extraordinary, and will help China for a generation to come!

That is why I was so against Yan Nieng leaving China for Princeton. She is an exceptional scientist who was already attracting international talent to China.

@JSCh @yusheng

 

[yusheng]

International cooperation among scientists is normal and should be encouraged, Pan was a very talented scientist when he went abroad.
so was Yan.

anyway, if China still pays attention and invests in education, brilliant scientists will emerge continously in the future.
no worry at all.

 

[JSCh]

Highly Cited Researchers 2017: China ‘powering ahead’ in key fields
China now third behind US and UK on Clarivate list of most impactful researchers worldwide

• November 15, 2017
  
• By Simon Baker Twitter: @HigherBaker

The number of Chinese researchers making a list of the most highly cited authors worldwide has gone up by more than a third in just a year.

According to the latest edition of the Highly Cited Researchers List, produced by Clarivate Analytics, China now ranks behind only the US and UK in terms of the countries with the most entries in the annual publication.

The list features more than 3,000 researchers, in 21 fields, who produced a “notable” number of highly cited papers in Clarivate’s Web of Science database over the period 2005-2015.

Authors are selected on the basis of “consistent production” of highly cited papers – defined as those that rank in the top 1 per cent by citations for field and publication year – to allow early career researchers to be considered as much as established names.

Researchers from the US continue to be the most represented in the list, with almost half of all the entries being affiliated with organisations, including research institutes and universities, in the nation.

In total, the US had more than 1,600 entries, a 13 per cent increase on last year, with the UK second, being responsible for almost 350 entries. However, China is gaining fast: its representation in the list has jumped 34 per cent compared with last year, giving it almost 240 entries.


In the category of engineering, a subject that China has been heavily focusing on for research, the country has the most entries with 51, way ahead of the US on 26. It is also second only to the US for representation in some fields, including computer science and materials science.

David Pendlebury, a senior citation analyst at Clarivate Analytics, said that China’s rise in publication output was a well-known trend but “what we are now seeing is [its] increasing presence among most cited authors and papers, especially in the physical sciences”.

Search our database of global university jobs

“China’s output of materials science papers is now more than twice that of the US, and it is capturing a greater and greater share of top cited papers in the field. In some fields China has not only caught up, but it is now powering ahead.”

In terms of institutions in China, the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS) is most represented, with 45 entries on the list. The institution also comes fourth in the world behind Harvard University in top spot (109 entries), Stanford University (64 entries) in second and Germany’s Max Planck Society (47) in third.


Meanwhile, Clarivate also released its latest list of researchers who, in recent years, have published multiple papers that have been rapidly accumulating citations, known as “Hot Papers”.

The current list features 21 researchers who, since 2014, have each published at least 14 Hot Papers, according to citations data running up until the end of last year.

Clarivate says that two “dominant” research themes have emerged in recent editions for this list: cancer genomics and the development of solar power using the mineral perovskite.

Sharing top spot for researchers with the most Hot Papers are Michael Grätzel, professor of physical chemistry at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, and Henry Snaith, professor of physics at the University of Oxford, who both appear as authors on separate batches of 29 papers on perovskite solar cells.

Both academics are also among 147 authors in the Highly Cited Researchers List who appear across more than one field, with Professor Grätzel authoring highly cited papers in four separate fields and Professor Snaith in three.

simon.baker@timeshighereducation.com



Highly Cited Researchers 2017: China ‘powering ahead’ in key fields | THE News

 

[Han Patriot]

Highly Cited Researchers 2017: China ‘powering ahead’ in key fields
China now third behind US and UK on Clarivate list of most impactful researchers worldwide

• November 15, 2017
  
• By Simon Baker Twitter: @HigherBaker

The number of Chinese researchers making a list of the most highly cited authors worldwide has gone up by more than a third in just a year.

According to the latest edition of the Highly Cited Researchers List, produced by Clarivate Analytics, China now ranks behind only the US and UK in terms of the countries with the most entries in the annual publication.

The list features more than 3,000 researchers, in 21 fields, who produced a “notable” number of highly cited papers in Clarivate’s Web of Science database over the period 2005-2015.

Authors are selected on the basis of “consistent production” of highly cited papers – defined as those that rank in the top 1 per cent by citations for field and publication year – to allow early career researchers to be considered as much as established names.

Researchers from the US continue to be the most represented in the list, with almost half of all the entries being affiliated with organisations, including research institutes and universities, in the nation.

In total, the US had more than 1,600 entries, a 13 per cent increase on last year, with the UK second, being responsible for almost 350 entries. However, China is gaining fast: its representation in the list has jumped 34 per cent compared with last year, giving it almost 240 entries.


In the category of engineering, a subject that China has been heavily focusing on for research, the country has the most entries with 51, way ahead of the US on 26. It is also second only to the US for representation in some fields, including computer science and materials science.

David Pendlebury, a senior citation analyst at Clarivate Analytics, said that China’s rise in publication output was a well-known trend but “what we are now seeing is [its] increasing presence among most cited authors and papers, especially in the physical sciences”.

Search our database of global university jobs

“China’s output of materials science papers is now more than twice that of the US, and it is capturing a greater and greater share of top cited papers in the field. In some fields China has not only caught up, but it is now powering ahead.”

In terms of institutions in China, the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS) is most represented, with 45 entries on the list. The institution also comes fourth in the world behind Harvard University in top spot (109 entries), Stanford University (64 entries) in second and Germany’s Max Planck Society (47) in third.


Meanwhile, Clarivate also released its latest list of researchers who, in recent years, have published multiple papers that have been rapidly accumulating citations, known as “Hot Papers”.

The current list features 21 researchers who, since 2014, have each published at least 14 Hot Papers, according to citations data running up until the end of last year.

Clarivate says that two “dominant” research themes have emerged in recent editions for this list: cancer genomics and the development of solar power using the mineral perovskite.

Sharing top spot for researchers with the most Hot Papers are Michael Grätzel, professor of physical chemistry at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, and Henry Snaith, professor of physics at the University of Oxford, who both appear as authors on separate batches of 29 papers on perovskite solar cells.

Both academics are also among 147 authors in the Highly Cited Researchers List who appear across more than one field, with Professor Grätzel authoring highly cited papers in four separate fields and Professor Snaith in three.

simon.baker@timeshighereducation.com



Highly Cited Researchers 2017: China ‘powering ahead’ in key fields | THE News

Bash us more, bash, and you will see what we will achieve. I have never doubted Chinese abilities.

 

[JSCh]

China plans world's most powerful particle collider
China Daily, October 29, 2015

Chinese scientists have completed an initial conceptual design of a super giant particle collider which will be bigger and more powerful than any particle accelerator on Earth.

"We have completed the initial conceptual design and organized international peer review recently, and the final conceptual design will be completed by the end of 2016," Wang Yifang, director of the Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, told China Daily in an exclusive interview.

The institute has been operating major high-energy physics projects in China, such as the Beijing Electron Positron Collider and the Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino experiment.

Now scientists are proposing a more ambitious new accelerator with seven times the energy level of the Large Hadron Collider in Europe.

In July 2012, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, also known as CERN, announced that it had discovered the long sought-after Higgs boson－the "God particle", regarded as the crucial link that could explain why other elementary particles have mass－on LHC.

The discovery was believed to be one of the most important in physics for decades. Scientists are hopeful that it will further explain nature and the universe we live in.

While LHC is composed of 27-kilometer-long accelerator chains and detectors buried 100 meters underground at the border of Switzerland and France, scientists only managed to spot hundreds of Higgs boson particles, not enough to learn the structure and other features of the particle.

With a circumference of 50 to 100 km, however, the proposed Chinese accelerator Circular Electron Positron Collider (CEPC) will generate millions of Higgs boson particles, allowing a more precise understanding.

"The technical route we chose is different from LHC. While LHC smashes together protons, it generates Higgs particles together with many other particles," Wang said.

"The proposed CEPC, however, collides electrons and positrons to create an extremely clean environment that only produces Higgs particles," he said.

The Higgs boson factory is only the first step of the ambitious plan. A second-phase project named SPPC (Super Proton-Proton Collider) is also included in the design－a fully upgraded version of LHC.

LHC shut down for upgrading in early 2013 and restarted in June with an almost doubled energy level of 13 TeV, a measurement of electron volts.

"LHC is hitting its limits of energy level, it seems not possible to escalate the energy dramatically at the existing facility," Wang said. The proposed SPPC will be a 100 TeV proton-proton collider.

If everything moves forward as proposed, the construction of the first phase project CEPC will start between 2020 and 2025, followed by the second phase in 2040.

"China brings to this entire discussion a certain level of newness. They are going to need help, but they have financial muscle and they have ambition," said Nima Arkani Hamed from the Institute for Advanced Study in the United States, who joined the force to promote CEPC in the world.

David J. Gross, a US particle physicist and 2004 Nobel Prize winner, wrote in a commentary co-signed by US theoretical physicist Edward Witten that although the cost of the project would be great, the benefits would also be great.

"China would leap to a leadership position in an important frontier area of basic science," he wrote.

Gerard't Hooft, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1999, said in an earlier interview to Doha-based broadcaster Al Jazeera that the proposed collider, if built, "will bring hundreds, probably thousands, of top class scientists with different specializations, from pure theory to experimental physics and engineering, from abroad to China".

CEPC Industrial Promotion Consortium Established
Nov 15, 2017

Over forty domestic entrepreneurs gathered at the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) and announced the establishment of an industrial promotion consortium for the Circular Electron Positron Collider (CEPC) Project on Nov. 7th 2017.

The CEPC Industrial Promotion Consortium (CIPC) will aim at promoting research progress, coordinating technology pre-research, organizing joint efforts in R&D for key technologies, and speeding up the industrialization of accelerator technology.

By participating in the construction of this large science facility, these entrepreneurs will improve their abilities in innovation and manufacturing, making it a win-win situation. It is expected that the domestic market of the entrepreneurs could be expanded, as well as opening a door to the international market, as they could become equipment suppliers for well-known international facilities.

Many of CEPC's key technologies, such as superconducting RF acceleration and high-Q superconducting RF cavities, will inevitably need to be developed for future accelerators. High-efficiency microwave power sources and large-scale refrigerators can be produced in China, which means the barriers for importing this kind of equipment could be broken down.

Some strategic cutting-edge technologies such as cryogenics, precision mechanisms, vacuum, electronics, radiation-resistant chips, automatic control, computers, etc., can achieve international leadership. In particular, high temperature superconducting wire and superconducting magnets are expected to lead the world, resulting in great economic and social benefits.

The establishment of the Industry Promotion Association can co-ordinate and bring together the strengths of the scientific community and the business community in the design of CEPC-SppC, pre-key technology research and industrialization development, as well as policy research and promotion of the project.

Developed countries have invested heavily in the construction of various types of large-scale scientific facilities, such as the well-known Hubble Space Telescope, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in the United States, Japan's Super Kamioka Neutrino Detector and so on.

These multi-billion-dollar investments have not only brought about fruitful scientific returns but also led the development of technology. One of the most famous examples is the World Wide Web, invented by CERN to solve the problem of data sharing between scientists. Internationally, there have been some studies on the input-output ratio of large scientific devices. For example, the input-output ratio of the large accelerators used for high-energy physics research is generally accepted to be around 1:3, that is to say, for each yuan invested, three yuan are generated.

CEPC-SppC is becoming a large international science project. The International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA) and Asian Committee for Future Accelerators have stated their support for research on energy frontier circular colliders and for global collaboration. To date, IHEP has signed MOUs on the CEPC project with over twenty institutions and universities. An International Advisory Committee has been founded and annual review meetings and related workshops are held every year.

Since the idea of constructing CEPC-SppC was proposed in 2012, IHEP has been promoting the design and pre-research of the project. In 2015, the preliminary concept design report was completed. With the assistance of the State Key Research and Development Program under the Ministry of Science and Technology, the project team has made fruitful progress in terms of accelerator physics design, superconducting accelerating cavities, klystrons, beam measurement, key technologies for linear accelerators, and key detector technologies. The CEPC-SppC conceptual design report will be completed by the end of 2017, laying a good foundation for producing the technical design report in 2018.


CEPC Industrial Promotion Consortium Established---Chinese Academy of Sciences

 

[Bussard Ramjet]

Today's edition of Nature is out.

And there are two Chinese papers in the journal.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature24062

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature24467

 

[JSCh]

2017 ACM Gordon Bell Prize Awarded to Chinese Team for 18.9 Petaflops Earthquake Simulation
November 16, 2017

DENVER, Nov. 16, 2017 – ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery (www.acm.org), has named a 12-member Chinese team the recipients of the 2017 ACM Gordon Bell Prize for their research project, “18.9-Pflops Nonlinear Earthquake Simulation on Sunway TaihuLight: Enabling Depiction of 18-Hz and 8-Meter Scenarios.” Using the Sunway TaihuLight, which is ranked as the world’s fastest supercomputer, the team developed software that was able to efficiently process 18.9 Pflops (or 18.9 quadrillion calculations per second) of data and create 3D visualizations relating to a devastating earthquake that occurred in Tangshan, China in 1976. The team’s software included innovations that achieved greater efficiency than had been previously attained running similar programs on the Titan and TaihuLight supercomputers.

The ACM Gordon Bell Prize (awards.acm.org/bell) tracks the progress of parallel computing and rewards innovation in applying high performance computing to challenges in science, engineering, and large-scale data analytics. The award was presented today by ACM President Vicki Hanson and Subhash Saini, Chair of the 2017 Gordon Bell Prize Award Committee, during the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC17) (sc17.supercomputing.org/) in Denver, Colorado.

Although earthquake prediction and simulation is an inexact and emerging area of research, scientists hope that the use of supercomputers, which can process vast sets of data to address the myriad of variables at play in geologic events, may lead to better prediction and preparedness. For example, the Chinese team’s 3D simulations may inform engineering standards for buildings being developed in zones known to have seismic activity. In this vein, many have advocated for a significant increase in the

amount of sensors to regularly monitor seismic activity. The Tangshan earthquake, which occurred on July 28, 1976 in Tangshan, Hebei, China, is regarded as the most devastating earthquake of the 20th century, and resulted in approximately 242,000-700,000 deaths. In developing their simulations for the Tangshan earthquake, the winning team included input data from the entire spatial area of the quake, a surface diameter of 320 km by 312 km, as well as 40 km deep below the earth’s surface. The input data also included a frequency range of the earthquake of up to 18 Hz (Hertz). In the study of earthquakes, a Hertz is a unit of measurement that measures the number of times an event happens in the period of a second. For example, it might correspond to the number of times the ground shakes back and forth during an earthquake. Previous simulations of violent earthquakes have employed a lower frequency than 18 Hz, since enormous memory and time consumption are needed for high frequency simulations.

This year’s winning team is not the first to develop algorithms for supercomputers in an effort to simulate earthquake activity. In the abstract of their presentation, the 2017 Gordon Bell recipients write: “Our innovations include: (1) a customized parallelization scheme that employs the 10 million cores efficiently at both the process and thread levels; (2) an elaborate memory scheme that integrates on-chip halo exchange through register communication, optimized blocking configuration guided by an analytic model, and coalesced DMA access with array fusion; (3) on-the-fly compression that doubles the maximum problem size and further improves the performance by 24%.”

Of its new innovations, the Chinese team adds that its on-the-fly compression scheme may be effectively applied to other challenges in exascale computing. In their paper, the authors state: “The even more exciting innovation is the on-the-fly compression scheme, which, at the cost of an acceptable level of accuracy lost, scales our simulation performance and capabilities even beyond the machine’s physical constraints. While the current compression scheme is largely customized for our specific application and the Sunway architecture, we believe the idea has great potential to be applied to other applications and other architectures.”

Winning team members include Haohuan Fu, Tsinghua University and National Supercomputing Center, Wuxi, China; Conghui He, Tsinghua University and National Supercomputing Center, Wuxi, China; Bingwei Chen, Tsinghua University and National Supercomputing Center, Wuxi, China; Zekun Yin, Shandong University; Zhenguo Zhang, Southern University of Science and Technology, China; Wenqiang Zhang, University of Science and Technology of China; Tingjian Zhang, Shandong University; Wei Xue, Tsinghua University and National Supercomputing Center, Wuxi, China; Weiguo Liu, Shandong University; Wanwang Yin, National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering and Technology, China; Guangwen Yang, Tsinghua University and National Supercomputing Center, Wuxi, China; and Xioafei Chen, Southern University of Science and Technology, China.

Innovations from advanced scientific computing have a far-reaching impact in many areas of science and society—from understanding the evolution of the universe and other challenges in astronomy, to complex geological phenomena, to nuclear energy research, to economic forecasting, to developing new pharmaceuticals. The annual SC conference brings together scientists, engineers and researchers from around the world for an outstanding week of technical papers, timely research posters, and tutorials.

The Sunway TaihuLight is a Chinese supercomputer with over 10.5 M heterogeneous cores and is ranked as the fastest supercomputer in the world. Located at the National Supercomputer Center in Wuxi, Jingsu, China, it is nearly three times as fast as the Tianhe-2, the supercomputer that previously held the world record for speed.


https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wir...se-team-18-9-petaflops-earthquake-simulation/

 

[JSCh]

High-tech companies in the limelight at Shenzhen expo
By Chai Hua and Zhou Mo in Shenzhen, Guangdong | China Daily | 2017-11-17 08:53

Visitors take photographs of an underwater robot in a tank at the China High-tech Fair 2017 held in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, on Nov 16, 2017. Xuan Hui / Provided to China Daily

Have you seen a machine that transforms air into drinking water, a window membrane to protect your home from outside pollutants, or a battery that needs only 30 seconds to charge?

Innovative companies and technologies are the top draw for foreign delegations and visitors at the China High-tech Fair 2017, a State-level technology show that kicked off on Thursday in Shenzhen, Guangdong province.

More than 1,000 new products are being showcased at the fair that has attracted 3,049 exhibitors from all over the world. Some of the top global technology companies are also participating in the event, such as the 3-D robotic sorting system from Intel and the latest 5G solution from Huawei.

In addition, the fair also set an exhibition zone for early-stage startups for the first time this year.

Delegations from 35 countries and the European Union are seeking cooperation with China's innovative high-tech companies.

The delegation from Argentina's La Rioja province, which is taking part in the event for the first time, signed a memorandum of understanding with China's leading new-energy carmaker BYD at the fair to purchase 50 electric buses. The Shenzhen-based company will also provide a package of new energy solutions, including electronic cars, e-trucks, solar panels, and energy storage systems.

Visitors watch flexible screens during the 19th China High-tech Fair in Shenzhen, South China's Guangdong province, Nov 16, 2017. More than 3,000 exhibitors would show latest achievements in science and technology here on the fair which kicked off on Thursday. [Photo/Xinhua]

Ruben Eduardo Galleguillo, minister of industry and planning of La Rioja, said "Argentina is a country with abundant agricultural and tourism resources, while China is advanced in technology. We hope to learn from and introduce Chinese technologies to our country while bringing our natural and cultural resources to China."
The province also signed an agreement with Chinese telecommunication company ZTE for smart city solutions at the exhibition.

John Kilmartin, executive director of Bahrain Economic Development Board, said they are looking at cloud solutions, digital entertainment services and internet security companies in particular.

"I am impressed by innovative products and technologies in the fair, such as facial recognition, virtual reality, IOT and robotics," he noted, "China is a beacon for Bahrain. Especially in Shenzhen, if we could emulate any small way what happened here, we would be very proud of that."

Several Chinese companies have already set up offices in Bahrain, such as Huawei, while companies in the e-commerce and online-gaming industry have charted plans to develop the market. Bahrain is also looking for Chinese investors to fund startups in the Middle East, he said.

​

Robots play football under the command of a person during the 19th China High-tech Fair in Shenzhen, South China's Guangdong province, Nov 16, 2017. More than 3,000 exhibitors would show latest achievements in science and technology here on the fair which kicked off on Thursday. [Photo/Xinhua]

​

A water dispenser which can condense air moisture is seen during the 19th China High-tech Fair in Shenzhen, South China's Guangdong province, Nov 16, 2017. More than 3,000 exhibitors would show latest achievements in science and technology here on the fair which kicked off on Thursday. [Photo/Xinhua]

​

A visitor tries an aircraft during the 19th China High-tech Fair in Shenzhen, South China's Guangdong province, Nov 16, 2017. More than 3,000 exhibitors would show latest achievements in science and technology here on the fair which kicked off on Thursday. [Photo/Xinhua]

​

A visitor experiences 3D theatre during the 19th China High-tech Fair in Shenzhen, South China's Guangdong province, Nov 16, 2017. More than 3,000 exhibitors would show latest achievements in science and technology here on the fair which kicked off on Thursday. [Photo/Xinhua]

​

The 19th China High-tech Fair is held in Shenzhen, South China's Guangdong province, Nov 16, 2017. More than 3,000 exhibitors would show latest achievements in science and technology here on the fair which kicked off on Thursday. [Photo/Xinhua]

 

[JSCh]

CSNS Beam Power Meets Goal of Acceptance
Nov 16, 2017

On November 9, 2017, an average beam power of 10 kW was achieved at the China Spallation Neutron Source (CSNS) when a proton beam with a repetition rate of 25 Hz collided on the tungsten target. This means the average beam power has met the acceptance goal of the CSNS project, marking another major step forward after the first beam was obtained in late August.

CSNS is composed of a linac with a modest but upgradable energy of 80 MeV, and a rapid cycling synchrotron (RCS) with energy of 1.6 GeV and repetition rate of 25 Hz. At present the linac can only provide an energy of 60 MeV, since one of the four klystrons for the drift tube linac (DTL) was returned to the factory in the USA due to a quality problem.

In April, the linac finished beam commissioning with the beam energy of 60 MeV. In July, the proton beam was accelerated to 1.6 GeV in the RCS. To reduce the beam loss, the CSNS team used single-shot mode for beam commissioning. On August 28, 2017, the first neutron beam was obtained from the tungsten target.

On November 1, 2017, the CSNS team began to provide beam with a repetition rate of 1 Hz, and received neutron signals at all three initial instruments during a joint beam commissioning. On November 9 of the same year, the proton beam pulses, with a repetition rate of 25 Hz struck on the tungsten target, which received an average beam power of more than 10 kW.

Imaging of the Proton Beam on Fluorescent Materials (Image by IHEP)​

 

[JSCh]

Chao Zhang, Yang Gao, Jiaojiao Liu, Zhe Xue, Yan Lu, Lian Deng, Lei Tian, Qidi Feng, Shuhua Xu. PGG.Population: a database for understanding the genomic diversity and genetic ancestry of human population. Nucleic Acids Research (2017). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkx1032

Abstract
There are a growing number of studies focusing on delineating genetic variations that are associated with complex human traits and diseases due to recent advances in next-generation sequencing technologies. However, identifying and prioritizing disease-associated causal variants relies on understanding the distribution of genetic variations within and among populations. The PGG.Population database documents 7122 genomes representing 356 global populations from 107 countries and provides essential information for researchers to understand human genomic diversity and genetic ancestry. These data and information can facilitate the design of research studies and the interpretation of results of both evolutionary and medical studies involving human populations. The database is carefully maintained and constantly updated when new data are available. We included miscellaneous functions and a user-friendly graphical interface for visualization of genomic diversity, population relationships (genetic affinity), ancestral makeup, footprints of natural selection, and population history etc. Moreover, PGG.Population provides a useful feature for users to analyze data and visualize results in a dynamic style via online illustration. The long-term ambition of the PGG.Population, together with the joint efforts from other researchers who contribute their data to our database, is to create a comprehensive depository of geographic and ethnic variation of human genome, as well as a platform bringing influence on future practitioners of medicine and clinical investigators. PGG.Population is available at https://www.pggpopulation.org.​

 

[JSCh]

Chinese students take top honors in SC17 supercomputer competition
Source: Xinhua| 2017-11-19 00:55:00|Editor: Zhou Xin



By Peter Mertz

DENVER, the United States, Nov. 16 (Xinhua) -- Singapore's Nanyang Technological University and China's Tsinghua University finished 1-2 in the 11th annual highly competitive Student Cluster Competition (SCC) at the Super Computer Conference (SC17) this week in Denver in the U.S. state of Colorado.

SCC was introduced in 2007 to expose undergraduate and high school students to high performance computing.

Over the past few months, six-person student teams designed and built small clusters with hardware and software vendor partners, learned designated scientific applications, and applied optimization techniques for their chosen architectures.

In the final days, students competed in a non-stop, 48-hour "mystery" challenge at the SC17 conference - to complete a real-world scientific work challenge.

A total of 16 teams competed in the 2017 competition, hailing from China, Germany, Poland, Singapore, the United States and China's Taiwan province.

The event is considered the penultimate student supercomputer competition in the world.

Tsinghua narrowly missed winning its third straight international computer competition of 2017 - edged out by a Singapore team comprised of all Mainland Chinese students.

"I was a little surprised we won," admitted modest Nanyang Technical University team co-leader Siyuan Liu from Hebei Province, whose team was considered a long shot by industry experts.

"We are very excited to finish ahead of such strong teams," the other co-leader Yiyang Shao told Xinhua, who also said they knew the team to beat was Tsinghua.

The favored Tsinghua team was having a phenomenal 2017 - taking top honors on April 17 at ASC17 in Wuxi, China, and on June 17 at ISC17 in Frankfurt, Germany, and were nudged out in a photo finish by a mere three points at SC17 in America's Mile High City.

"I thought they were going to win," SCC Chairman Stephen Harrell told Xinhua, of the favored Tsinghua team.

Harrell, a computer technical expect from Purdue University was given the difficult task of compiling results from a panel of judges who ranked the diverse international field.

"No one's a loser in this competition," Harrell emphasized, as he met with, and complimented all of the teams after the top honor was announced.

"All of these students will be very successful in life and in the HPC field," he said.

Harrell, who emphasized the integrity displayed by the Chinese students from both teams, said that interviews and a poster competition also factored into the decision-making.

This year's all decisive "mystery" question dealt with the migration of carbon dioxide around the world, and students were asked to simulate the flow of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere using calculations and creating an algorithm.

"It was exhausting," Tsinghua team leader Beichen Li told Xinhua of the final two-day, no-sleep element of competition that began Nov. 13.

"The memories and the experience of being in this competition far outweighs the paper given out here," Harrell noted.

Tsinghua University professor Jidong Zhai was gracious in finishing behind Singapore's team, and had nothing but praise for his young superstars.

"Although we finished second, the team members did a very good job," advisor Zhai told Xinhua. "They were very impressive, and I was very happy to work with such a group of smart guys."

"We will come back next year," team leader Beichen Li said with a smile.

 

[JSCh]

Chao Zhang, Yang Gao, Jiaojiao Liu, Zhe Xue, Yan Lu, Lian Deng, Lei Tian, Qidi Feng, Shuhua Xu. PGG.Population: a database for understanding the genomic diversity and genetic ancestry of human population. Nucleic Acids Research (2017). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkx1032

Abstract
There are a growing number of studies focusing on delineating genetic variations that are associated with complex human traits and diseases due to recent advances in next-generation sequencing technologies. However, identifying and prioritizing disease-associated causal variants relies on understanding the distribution of genetic variations within and among populations. The PGG.Population database documents 7122 genomes representing 356 global populations from 107 countries and provides essential information for researchers to understand human genomic diversity and genetic ancestry. These data and information can facilitate the design of research studies and the interpretation of results of both evolutionary and medical studies involving human populations. The database is carefully maintained and constantly updated when new data are available. We included miscellaneous functions and a user-friendly graphical interface for visualization of genomic diversity, population relationships (genetic affinity), ancestral makeup, footprints of natural selection, and population history etc. Moreover, PGG.Population provides a useful feature for users to analyze data and visualize results in a dynamic style via online illustration. The long-term ambition of the PGG.Population, together with the joint efforts from other researchers who contribute their data to our database, is to create a comprehensive depository of geographic and ethnic variation of human genome, as well as a platform bringing influence on future practitioners of medicine and clinical investigators. PGG.Population is available at https://www.pggpopulation.org.​

Scientists Release a Database for Genomic Diversity and Genetic Ancestry of Global Human Populations
Nov 17, 2017

Population genetic diversity is shaped by complex process across human evolutionary history, including population divergence, migration, isolation, and admixture. Local adaptation to environments such as high-altitude, pathogen and dietary shift, could also affect the diversity of human genome locally. Genomic diversity further determines largely the phenotypic diversity. Therefore, understanding phenotypic differences between populations (including diseases, anthropological traits and adaptive traits) relies on delineating genetic diversity and ancestry as well as evolutionary history of human populations.

In a study published online in Nucleic Acids Research, Prof. Dr. XU Shuhua's group at Max Planck Independent Research Group on Population Genomics, CAS-MPG Partner Institute for Computational Biology, Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences of Chinese Academy of Sciences analyzed the genomic diversity and genetic ancestry of 356 ethnic groups from 107 counties, and released a database named "PGG.Population” through which users can freely access to the data and related information of global populations.

PGG.Population is the only database being committed to dissect the genetic affinities of populations and genetic ancestries for each ethnic group at the genomic level. It is also the one covering the largest number of populations to date, proving a query and analysis platform for researchers, clinical and medical doctors, students and the public to understand the genetic background of each ethnic group.

Over the past decades, many joint forces based on international collaborations have made remarkable achievements in studying human genetic variation, such as the Human Genome Diversity Project, the HapMap Project, the HUGO Pan-Asian SNP Project and the 1000 Genomes Project. Nonetheless, most efforts have focused on major groups of large population size but ignored indigenous groups which usually have much smaller population size.

PGG.Population was born at the right moment. Researchers sequenced and collected the genomes of diverse populations especially for small/unique groups, integrated them and re-analyzed each combined dataset. Meanwhile, they built a free available database to illustrate the genomic diversity and genetic ancestry (including basic information, Y and mtDNA haplogroup, genetic affinities, population structure, admixture and local adaptation) for each ethnic group.

Up to date, the database has documented 7122 genomes, representing 356 non-redundant populations/groups from 107 countries in eight regions (Africa, America, Central Asia and Siberia, East Asia, Oceania, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and West Eurasia) collected from 27 studies. Every population has its own story. The long-term ambition of the PGG.Population, together with the joint efforts from other researchers who contributed their data to this database, is to create a comprehensive depository of geographic and ethnic variation of human genome, as well as a platform bringing influence on future practitioners of medicine and clinical investigators.

However, it still has a long way to achieve the goal. There are more than 2,000 populations worldwide, and the database currently only covers one sixth of those groups. Scientists are now sequencing and collecting genomes from more populations. In addition, PGG.Population will extend to comprehensive analysis of population genetics and genomics. “We call for more cooperation and contribution from geneticists, linguists, anthropologists, medical and clinical doctors,” said Dr. XU Shuhua.

This work was supported by the Strategic Priority Research Program and Key Research Program of Frontier Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the National Natural Science Foundation of China grant, the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars, the Program of Shanghai Academic Research Leader, and the National Key Research and Development Program, and by the National Program for Top-notch Young Innovative Talents of The “Ten Thousand Talent Program”.


Scientists Release a Database for Genomic Diversity and Genetic Ancestry of Global Human Populations---Chinese Academy of Sciences