Reebok’s plant-based shoe, fish-free seafood, mango-based bioplastic, breakthrough plant breeding, autosteer for small farms, biosand water filters, concrete from waste: The Digest’s Top 10 Innovations for the week of August 22nd

#10 Breaking biofuel and bioproduct barriers with supercomputers

In Tennessee, supercomputers have become even more super with exascale computing (about 1018 calculations per second), now going up to a feat never before achieved that can help biofuel and bioproduct gene targeting and help scientists analyze massive data sets. Scientists were able to reach 1.88 exaops, or almost 2 billion billion calculations per second. That is not a typo – using a “mixture of numerical precisions on a new NVIDIA graphic processing unit computer chip technology called tensor cores” the research team at Oak Ridge National Laboratory were able to achieve this peak throughput faster than any previously reported science application while analyzing genomic data on the Summit supercomputer.

More on the story.