GS Paper: GS3-17.Awareness in the fields of IT, Space, Computers, Robotics, Nano-technology, Bio-technology and issues relating to Intellectual Property Rights.

Market leader Nvidia recently announced its H100 GPU (graphics processing unit), which is said to be one of the world’s largest and most powerful Artificial Intelligence (AI) accelerators, packed with 80 billion transistors.

What are AI chips?

• AI chips are built with specific architecture and have integrated AI acceleration to support deep learning-based applications.
• These chips, with their hardware architectures and complementary packaging, memory, storage and interconnect technologies, make it possible to infuse AI into a broad spectrum of applications.
• There are different types of AI chips such as application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), central processing units (CPUs) and GPUs, designed for diverse AI applications.

What is Deep Learning?

• Deep learning, more commonly known as active neural network (ANN) or deep neural network (DNN), is a subset of machine learning and comes under the broader umbrella of AI.
• It combines a series of computer commands or algorithms that stimulate activity and brain structure.
• DNNs go through a training phase, learning new capabilities from existing data.
• DNNs can then inference, by applying these capabilities learned during deep learning training to make predictions against previously unseen data.
• Deep learning can make the process of collecting, analysing, and interpreting enormous amounts of data faster and easier.

Utility of AI chips

• The adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) chips has risen, with chipmakers designing different types of these chips to power AI applications such as:

1. Natural language processing (NLP)
2. Computer vision
3. Robotics, and
4. Network security across a wide variety of sectors, including automotive, IT, healthcare, and retail

Are they different from traditional chips?

• When traditional chips, containing processor cores and memory, perform computational tasks, they continuously move commands and data between the two hardware components.
• These chips, however, are not ideal for AI applications as they would not be able to handle higher computational necessities of AI workloads which have huge volumes of data.
• Although, some of the higher-end traditional chips may be able to process certain AI applications.
• In comparison, AI chips generally contain processor cores as well as several AI-optimised cores that are designed to work in harmony when performing computational tasks.
• The AI cores are optimised for the demands of heterogeneous enterprise-class AI workloads with low-latency inferencing, due to close integration with the other processor cores.

What are their applications?

• Use of AI chips for NLP applications has increased due to the rise in demand for chatbots and online channels such as Messenger, Slack, and others
• They use NLP to analyse user messages and conversational logic.
• Then there are chipmakers who have built AI processors designed to help customers achieve business insights at scale across banking, finance, trading, insurance applications and customer interactions.

What firms are making these chips?

• Nvidia Corporation, Intel Corporation, IBM Corporation, Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., and Apple Inc. are some of the key players in the AI chip market.

Major breakthroughs

• Nvidia, which dominates the market, offers a wide portfolio of AI chips including Grace CPU, H100 and its predecessor A100 GPUs.
• It is capable of handling some of the largest AI models with billions of parameters.
• The company claims that twenty H100 GPUs can sustain the equivalent of the entire world’s internet traffic.
• IBM’s new AI chip, announced last year, can support financial services workloads like fraud detection, loan processing, clearing and settlement of trades, anti-money laundering and risk analysis.

Scale of global market

• The Worldwide AI chip industry accounted for $8.02 billion in 2020.
• It is expected to reach $194.9 billion by 2030, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 37.4% from 2021 to 2030.

What can be expected in the future?

• AI company Cerebras Systems set a new standard with its brain-scale AI solution, paving the way for more advanced solutions in the future.
• Its CS-2, powered by the Wafer Scale Engine (WSE-2) is a single wafer-scale chip with 2.6 trillion transistors and 8,50,000 AI optimised cores.
• The human brain contains on the order of 100 trillion synapses, the firm said, adding that a single CS-2 accelerator can support models of over 120 trillion parameters (synapse equivalents) in size.
• Another AI chip design approach, neuromorphic computing, utilises an engineering method based on the activity of the biological brain.
• An increase in the adoption of neuromorphic chips in the automotive industry is expected in the next few years.

 

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Researchers from Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) Collaboration, in the US, announced that they have made a precise measurement of the mass of the so-called W boson.

Do you know?

There are four fundamental forces at work in the universe: the strong force, the weak force, the electromagnetic force, and the gravitational force. They work over different ranges and have different strengths. Gravity is the weakest but it has an infinite range.

What is W Boson?

• Discovered in 1983, the W boson is a fundamental particle.
• Together with the Z boson, it is responsible for the weak force, one of four fundamental forces that govern the behaviour of matter in our universe.
• Particles of matter interact by exchanging these bosons, but only over short distances.
• The W boson, which is electrically charged, changes the very make up of particles.
• It switches protons into neutrons, and vice versa, through the weak force, triggering nuclear fusion and letting stars burn.
• This burning also creates heavier elements and, when a star dies, those elements are tossed into space as the building blocks for planets and even people.

Debate over W Boson’s mass

• The weak force was combined with the electromagnetic force in theories of a unified electroweak force in the 1960s, in an effort to make the basic physics mathematically consistent.
• But the theory called for the force-carrying particles to be massless, even though scientists knew the theoretical W boson had to be heavy to account for its short range.
• Theorists accounted for the mass of the W by introducing another unseen mechanism. This became known as the Higgs mechanism, which calls for the existence of a Higgs boson.

What is the news?

• CDF researchers stated that this precisely determined value did not match with what was expected from estimates using the standard model of particle physics.
• This result is highly significant because this implies the incompleteness of the standard model description.
• This is a major claim, since the standard model has been extraordinarily successful in the past decades.
• Hence, physicists are looking for corroboration from other, independent, future experiments.

What is the standard model of elementary particle physics?

• The Standard Model of particle physics is the theory describing three of the four known fundamental forces (the electromagnetic, weak, and strong interactions while omitting gravity) in the universe and classifying all known elementary particles.
• It is a theoretical construct in physics that describes particles of matter and their interaction. Ex. Proton, Neutron, Electron etc.
• It is a description that views the elementary particles of the world as being connected by mathematical symmetries, just as an object and its mirror image are connected by a bilateral (left–right) symmetry.
• These are mathematical groups generated by continuous transformations from, say, one particle to another.
• According to this model there are a finite number of fundamental particles which are represented by the characteristic “eigen” states of these groups.
• The particles predicted by the model, such as the Z boson, have been seen in experiments and the last to be discovered, in 2012, was the Higgs boson which gives mass to the heavy particles.

Why is the standard model believed to be incomplete?

• The standard model is thought to be incomplete because it gives a unified picture of only three of the four fundamental forces of nature and it totally omits gravity.
• So, in the grand plan of unifying all forces so that a single equation would describe all the interactions of matter, the standard model was found to be lacking.
• The other gap in the standard model is that it does not include a description of dark matter particles.

How are the symmetries related to particles?

• The symmetries of the standard model are known as gauge symmetries, as they are generated by “gauge transformations” which are a set of continuous transformations (like rotation is a continuous transformation).
• Each symmetry is associated with a gauge boson.
• For example, the gauge boson associated with electromagnetic interactions is the photon.
• The gauge bosons associated with weak interactions are the W and Z bosons. There are two W bosons — W+ and W-.

What is the main result of the recent experiment?

• The recent experiment at CDF, which measured the mass of the W boson as 80,433.5 +/- 9.4 Mev/c2, which is approximately 80 times the mass of a hydrogen nucleus.
• This came out to be more than what is expected from the standard model.
• The expected value using the standard model is 80,357 +/- 8 MeV/c2 .
• Thus, the W boson mass itself is a prediction of the standard model.
• Therefore, any discrepancy in its mass means a lack of self-consistency in the standard model.

What is the discrepancy they obtained?

• The mass discrepancy of the W boson needs to be checked and confirmed to the same accuracy by other facilities, for example, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Where do we stand now in terms of new physics?

• New physics is in the air, and experiments have been gearing up for some years now to detect new particles.
• With its high-precision determination of the W boson mass, the CDF has struck at the heart of the standard model.
• So it is a significant finding and if this is confirmed by the LHC and other experiments, it will throw open the field for ideas and experiment.

 

 

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The Union government has constituted an expert panel to probe the recent series of battery explosions in electric vehicles (EVs).

Why is the world poised to transition to electric vehicles?

• The growing concern over climate change has led to global efforts to electrify the transportation sector.
• In parallel, cost of Li-ion (Lithium-ion) battery technology has decreased by a staggering order of magnitude in the past decade.
• The convergence of these two factors has resulted in a unique time in our history where we are at the cusp of a dramatic transition in the transportation sector.
• There are multiple trade-offs in this complex ecosystem: engineering higher safety often results in higher costs and lower driving range.
• In this competitive landscape where companies are vying for market share, a race to the bottom can compromise safety.

A race to nowhere

• The world has taken note of this moment with governments providing incentives to usher in the transition and private industry ramping up plans for capturing the market.
• There is a worldwide race emerging, with vehicle companies, battery manufacturers, and material suppliers vying with each other for market share.
• However, Li-ion batteries are complex devices requiring a level of sophistication that can takes years to perfect.
• Hurrying the development of this complex technology without careful safeguards are leading to increasing safety incidents, as evidenced recently on Indian roads.

What goes into a Li-ion battery?

• Every Li-ion battery consists of three active components:

1. Anode: typically graphite
2. Cathode: based on a nickel, cobalt, and manganese-based oxide; and
3. Electrolyte: A salt of lithium in an inorganic solvent

• Battery cells are assembled into modules and then further assembled into packs.
• Li-ion batteries require tight control on the state of charge and the temperature of operation to enhance safety and increase usable life, achieved by adding multiple sensors.
• Packs are designed to ensure uniform temperature profile with minimal thermal variation during operation.

What is the level of precision involved?

• Battery manufacturing is a complex operation involving forming sheets of the anode and cathode and assembling them into a sandwich structure held apart by a thin separator.
• Separators, about 15 microns in thickness — about a fifth of the thickness of the human hair — perform the critical function of preventing the anode and cathode from shorting.
• Accidental shorting of the electrodes is a known cause of fires in Li-ion cells.
• It is important that the various layers are assembled with high precision with tight tolerances maintained throughout the manufacturing process.
• Safety features, such as thermal switches that turn off if the battery overheats, are added as the sandwich is packaged into a battery cell.

What causes battery fires?

• Battery fires, like other fires, occur due to the convergence of three parts of the “fire triangle”: heat, oxygen, and fuel.
• If an adverse event such as a short circuit occurs in the battery, the internal temperature can raise as the anode and cathode release their energy through the short.
• This, in turn, can lead to a series of reactions from the battery materials, especially the cathode, that release heat in an uncontrolled manner, along with oxygen.
• Such events also rupture the sealed battery further exposing the components to outside air and the second part of the fire triangle, namely, oxygen.
• The final component of the triangle is the liquid electrolyte, which is highly flammable and serves as a fuel.
• The combination leads to a catastrophic failure of the battery resulting in smoke, heat, and fire, released instantaneously and explosively.

What triggers battery fire?

• The trigger for such events can be a result of internal shorts (like a manufacturing defect that results in sharp objects penetrating the separator).
• The external events may be accident leading to puncture of the cell and shorting of the electrodes, overcharging the battery.
• Any of these triggers may cascade into a significant safety incident.

Are battery fires inevitable?

• Over the past three decades, Li-ion batteries have proved to be extremely safe, with the industry increasing controls as safety incidents have surfaced.
• Safety is a must and is an important consideration that battery and vehicle manufacturers can design for at multiple levels from the choice of battery material to designs at the cell, pack, and vehicle level.
• Protecting the cell with robust thermal management is critical, especially in India where ambient temperatures are high.
• Finally, battery packs need to be protected from external penetration.
• Any large-scale manufacturing process inevitably has a certain percentage of defects; therefore, such steps are needed to minimise the number of adverse events.

Why battery safety matters?

• Safety remains a concern for Li-ion manufacturers worldwide especially as cell sizes become larger for applications such as solar-connected storage.
• There is a need to remove the threat of battery fires as the roll out of mass electrification takes place.

 

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