News on China's scientific and technological development.

Financed by the Ministry of Science and Technology and the National Natural Science Foundation, a project, jointly undertaken by CAS Institute of Geology and Geophysics and Beijing Jixing Jida Technology, has rolled out a cooperative parallel computing system made up of GPU (graphics processor) and CPU (central processing unit).

Thanks to the application of a range of high-end technologies, including super heterogeneous parallel computing and reverse time migration, the new system is able to produce seismic images with greatly enhanced quality.

Comparing with an conventional imaging system, the new system enjoys numerous merits, including high-speed computing, high-speed memory, and high-speed communication, with a raised per node computational capability by 150 times, a raised per kilowatt electricity computing power by 37 times, and an increased per RMB 10,000 computing power by 50 times.

LIU Qin, General Manager of Jixing Jida Technology, told reporters that the system is built on a range of theoretical and technological innovations. For example, researchers have for the first time in the world proposed to raise the performance of the image processor using "decoupling" altitude algorithm.

"Asymmetric travel time pre-stack time migration" technology, another high precision seismic imaging technology developed by researchers in 2009, has found applications in some 20 domestic and international oil fields, including the Daqing Oilfield and the Shengli Oilfield, saved RMB 660 million from buying similar hardware and software from overseas vendors.

Click to expand...

For years, deep in an underground European laboratory, Chinese physicists have been contributing to one of the most ambitious scientific experiments ever attempted — a search for the missing link at the beginning of the universe.

"How do we seize Higgs boson?" said Chen Guoming, a researcher at the Institute of High Energy Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

"We copy the starting moment of the universe."

Chen was one of 3,000 scientists from 175 universities or research institutions in 38 countries and regions who have spent several years re-creating mini Big Bangs in a 100-meter underground laboratory on the French-Swiss border in an attempt to find the elusive particle.

Better known as the "God particle", it is the crucial link that could explain why other elementary particles have mass.

Last week, in a major scientific breakthrough, scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, better known as CERN, announced they had found a particle consistent with the Higgs boson, an announcement greeted with great fanfare in the scientific community across the globe.

CERN conducted two major experiments focused on finding the Higgs boson — CMS and ATLAS. Thirty scientific researchers from China, representing the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Peking University, took part in the search for the particle.

On July 4, CERN announced the CMS and ATLAS experiments had observed a new particle that was consistent with the Higgs particle.

"It's hard not to get excited by these results," said CERN Research Director Sergio Bertolucci.

"We stated last year that in 2012 we would either find a new Higgs-like particle or exclude the existence of the Standard Model Higgs. With all the necessary caution, it looks to me that we are at a branching point: the observation of this new particle indicates the path for the future toward a more detailed understanding of what we're seeing in the data."

The Higgs boson is named after British physicist Peter Higgs who, along with others, proposed the mechanism that suggested such a particle existed in 1964 — a theory ridiculed by some of the most respected minds of the time.

Stephen Hawking even bet another renowned physicist, Gordon Kane of the University of Michigan, $100 that the Higgs particle would not be found.

"It seems I have just lost $100," Hawking was quoted saying in London newspaper The Daily Telegraph following CERN's breakthrough.

Last week, Higgs, 83, traveled to Switzerland to witness the landmark announcement. The octogenarian was visibly moved as the presentation finished to tumultuous applause from a wildly excited audience, some of whom had waited overnight to secure their seats.

Choking back tears, Higgs paid tribute to the scientists who worked on the project.

"I would like to add my congratulations to everyone involved in this achievement. It's really an incredible thing that it's happened in my lifetime," Higgs said.

The CMS program cost about 500 million Swiss francs ($511.47 million), of which China contributed 1 percent.

China built the Resistive Plate Chamber, one-third of the Cathoed Strip Chamber, and supplied materials to help build part of a device called an electromagnetic calorimeter.

The experiment was carried out in the $511 million Large Hadron Collider, a huge device mainly made up of a 27 km ring of powerful magnets. Protons are placed into the collider and made to speed up before crashing together. Particle detectors in the machine read the data.

"Let's assume that you have two crystal balls, both composed of some inner structures you do not know. If you clash the two, they break apart into pieces, and then you can see what is in it," Chen said.

"That is like what we did on Large Hadron Collider, only it is much more difficult," he said.

"Actually the chance of finding Higgs boson is so rare that you could have 1 trillion collisions and you get one Higgs boson."

One barrier faced by the scientists was that the collision produced other particles called hadron and quantum photon. The scientists had to find a way to distinguish the particles from each other in order to find the Higgs boson.

"Chinese scientists found a unique method to distinguish the two particles, which was better than the solution of any other team. So our method was used for this and helped find the hint of Higgs boson," Chen said.

CERN is not the first group of scientists to search for the Higgs boson.

Before the Large Hadron Collider was switched on in 2008, the Tevatron in the United States was the most powerful collider in the world and in its final years of operation, raced to catch the first glimpse of the Higgs boson.

Although Tevatron was closed in 2011 due to budget constraints, the scientists involved in that project announced in March they had found evidence of a new fundamental particle that had a mass that fit in with predictions for the Higgs boson and was similar to experimental evidence announced by the Swiss-based scientists in December.

Click to expand...

"Protective and sustainable development of oil reserves: microbial regulating techniques and associated industrial applications", a project undertaken by a team led by MOU Bozhong at East China University of Technology Institute of Applied Chemistry, has landed major breakthroughs in boosting oil production with the help of microbes, including microbial community structure detection technique at the molecular level, functional microbe identification technique, oil producing microbial strains and associated nutritional system, and inter-well microbial tracing techniques, based on the models built by the team.

The efforts have resulted in the proprietary solutions to addressing an array of issues, including dynamic microbial activity tests, protective oil mining, and the cyclic utilization of microbial communities.

Thanks to more than a decade study, MOU and coworkers have identified the needed bacterial species in underground oil fields and associated functions. So far, they have established a 50-acre bacteria cultivating base in the Daqing Oil Field.

The bacterial strains derived from the base would be used to meet the required needs. As a result, one is able to turn the oil field into a natural "bio-reactor" simply by injecting the bacteria bathed in the nutrient solution into the underground oil filed. The water separated can be recycled for another round of injection, once the oil has been extracted.

Click to expand...

Thanks to the support of the National 863 Program, China has developed a range of remote sensing hardware and software, including advanced visible light, infrared, laser, and synthetic aperture radar that can be applied in high-precision small scale remote sensing, UAV remote sensing, and high-performance SAR remote sensing.

The said remote sensing hardware and software have played a major role in shaping up China’s national remote sensing network, and in mapping, mining, farming, water conservancy, environmental protection, transportation, disaster prevention and preparedness, defense, and construction activities.

The high-precision small scale remote sensing system is made up of a small POS, a stability platform, a high-precision wide-angle light digital camera, a light onboard LIDAR, an ultra-light aircraft (UAV) and corresponding software. The patented and fully-featured system enjoys numerous merits, including smaller size, lighter weight, lower cost, and easier operation, compared with similar overseas products.

It can be used in high-resolution terrestrial observation, large scale mapping, natural disasters response, digital city among others, saving resources and improving the efficiency of remote sensing activities.

The high-performance SAR remote sensing system has landed breakthroughs in the system as a whole, system integration, X-band interference SAR, P-band polarization SAR, and topographic mapping, up to the technical precision needs at the scales of 1:10,000 and 1:50,000, along with the proven technical flows and standards.

The successful development of the system has freed China from the monopoly of imported technology, filled up a gap in the country, making China the third country possessing a SAR remote sensing system in the world. The technology has been successfully applied in a major national project to map the west part of the country, a promotion to the commercial applications of SAR remote sensing industry.

China has established a high-performance unmanned remote sensing payload verification system, in addition to the efforts to master a range of key technologies, including multi-UAV payload loading, universal payload, high-capacity storage, safe flight control, precision navigation and positioning, and real-time data transmission.

Chinese scientists have for the first time in the world realized the data acquisition of high spatial resolution and hyperspectral camera, wide field of view multi-spectral imager, interference and polarization synthetic aperture radar, and developed a fast assemble capability of 150kg worth payloads for a 10-hour flight mission.

Click to expand...

In implementing a national S&T program, the Ministry of Science and Technology and Civil Aviation Administration of China have jointly initiated a project to work on the new generation air traffic control management system, which rolled out 63 key technologies, 7 domestic or international technical standards, 140 patent applications, 13 technology systems or platforms, 34 applications, and 1 first prize of National Technology Invention Award, covering the areas of performance-based aviation navigation, data link and precise positioning based comprehensive air surveillance, collaborative air traffic control, and civic air traffic control information platform.

Performance Based Navigation (PBN) has found applications in the Lhasa Airport and the Lingzhi Airport in the west plateau areas. The new technology makes continuous curve landing and taking off that could not be achieved using traditional technology possible, breaking up the old practice of one way landing only at the Lhasa airport, and visual landing only at the Lingzhi Airport.

The proprietary GNSS calibration platform has been installed at China Civil Aviation Calibration Center, the first GNSS application in calibrating air traffic control radar in the country, making China one a few countries in the world able to develop an aviation calibration and accreditation platform.

A range of other new technologies, including automated conflict prediction system and multi-source monitoring data fusion technology, have been successfully applied in some 30 Chinese made air traffic control systems, providing powerful technical support for implementing RVSM, and raising airspace capacity, along with a return worth RMB 110 million for the industry.

The proprietary ADS-B system has been tested and applied in the Chengdu and Jiuzhaigou areas, a prelude for establishing an ADS-B application system up to the requirements of new generation air traffic control system.

Click to expand...

China’s first millimeter wave three-baseline InSAR prototype has been successfully developed in the National Key Laboratory of Microwave Imaging Technology in Institute of Electronics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (IECAS). The prototype is the fruit of “Key Technology in Airborne Millimeter Wave Three-Baseline Cross-Track InSAR” task in the subject of new remote sensing technologies in earth observation and navigation, which is part of the “863 Program” (National High-tech R&D Program of China) in China’s 11th Five-Year Plan.

InSAR is the abbreviation for Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar technology. The new observation technology from the space to the earth, which uses the two SAR pictures of the same place as the basic handling data to get the interfering pictures via calculating the phase difference of the two SAR pictures, getting the terrain elevation data of interfering stripe after phase unwrapping.

The millimeter wave cross-track InSAR prototype is provided with three baselines and employs an optical remote sensing equipment stabilization platform. Compared with the short-range multi-baseline millimeter wave InSAR developed by Germany and the single-baseline millimeter wave InSAR developed by JPL in the USA, the middle-/low-altitude flight platform-based overall design and technological solution of this prototype presents certain advancement.

Meanwhile, the InISAR imaging tests against moving objects both in the air and on the ground by using this prototype have achieved satisfactory technological level and image quality, and are of great importance to the development of advanced SAR and InSAR system.

Click to expand...

Tsinghua University recently announced that it has rolled out a 3D video chip named Qing-Cube, applicable to high-quality video conversion from plane to three-dimensional images.

The home made 3D TV equipped with the proprietary chip will be sold in the marketplace July this year. Meanwhile, a range of 2G and 3G products, including 3D video set-top box and naked eye 3D TV, will make their debut in the coming three years.

At a launch event, Tsinghua made debut of an array of products equipped with Qing-Cube chips, including Haier 3D smart TV, Changhong 3D TV, high-definition 3D set-top box, and 3D cell phones. It is learned that a 3D TV that will be sold by a well-known domestic appliance vendor in the market July this year is a fully proprietary Chinese made 3D TV.

The 3D TV that has to be watched using a pair of 3D glasses at a cost of RMB 300-1000 is the first generation Qing-Cube product.

According to a briefing, Tsinghua has been working on 2nd and 3rd generation chips. 2G chip will be embedded in a set-top box, allowing people to view 3D programs on a regular LCD television set with the help of a pair of red-and-green glasses worth less than 1 dollar. A 3G Qing-Cube chip will allow people to view 3D TV programs simply through naked eyes.

Click to expand...

A supercomputer capable of a hundred trillion floating-point operations per second, jointly developed by Tsinghua University and Inspur, was put into official operation on April 15, 2011.

The new system is the highest performance computing platform operating at a higher learning institution, or the fastest supercomputer applied in modeling the Earth system in the country.

The two parties inked on the same day an accord to jointly develop an Earth system simulator.

The supercomputer housing the Earth system simulator is built on an ultra-scalable heterogeneous parallel architecture, enjoying 172 trillion floating-point operations per second.

The system is applied with a range of innovative designs, including high-density modular computing, hierarchical aggregate high-speed network switching, PB-class scalable mass storage system, and adaptive intelligent liquid cooling system.

At present, the system has been assigned to work on the computational tasks of climate modeling, prediction, and evaluation for the Fifth Assessment Report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC-AR5).

Click to expand...