Intel presented Prof. Stephen Hawking with a greeting for his 71st birthday on a 300 mm piece of silicon

The width of each letter is 10 microns, about a tenth of the width of a human hair

In a ceremony held at the Center for Theoretical Cosmology in Cambridge on January 8, Intel gave a unique birthday present to Prof. Stephen Hawking, who is 71 years old.

The gift is a 300 mm piece of silicon that is usually used to manufacture Intel's chips, on which the greeting "Congratulations Stephen Hawking" is stamped hundreds of times.

The blessing was "printed" using Intel's 32 nm production technology. The writing was done using thin copper lines on a nanomillimeter scale, of the type typically used to produce high-quality, power-efficient chips, such as those used in the latest smartphones with Intel Inside technology. The width of each letter is 10 microns, about a tenth of the width of a human hair.

"This is a very special gift for an extraordinary scientist and an extraordinary person," said Prof. Martin Curley, Vice President at Intel and Director of Intel Laboratories in Europe, when presenting the gift. "Professor Hawking's scientific breakthroughs and his resilience are an inspiration to all of us."

Prof. Stephen Hawking is the research director and founder of the Center for Theoretical Cosmology. The Centre's new supercomputer, COSMOS Mk IX, which is part of the UK DiRAC Facility, based on Intel technology, is designed to solve some of the most complex mathematical challenges facing cosmology researchers today. The computer will be used to examine the origin of the universe, analyze cosmic background radiation data received from the European satellite "Planck", and investigate the complexity of the origins of our universe with the help of lattice field theory simulations that simulate non-linear phenomena in the first fractions of a second of the universe.

The supercomputer is expected to contribute to the answer to questions such as what happened in the first moments after the big bang, what were the ancient seeds that led to the formation of the galaxies, the stars and eventually, also humans.

The COSMOS MK IX uses its 1,856 Intel Xeon E5 processor cores assisted by 31 Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessors, which together reach a theoretical peak performance of approximately 75 trillion floating point operations per second (TFLOPS).

"We have been in contact with Prof. Hawking for a long time," said Justin Ratner, Intel's Chief Technology Officer and CEO of Intel Laboratories worldwide. "We are very happy to continue supporting the work of the Center for Theoretical Cosmology, and to work closely with Prof. Hawking in improving his personal communication system."

The piece of silicon was awarded to Prof. Hawking following the State of the Universe symposium held on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, and in recognition of his contribution to research in basic physics and cosmology. Intel broadcast the event live on the Internet.

Intel also announced its sponsorship of the COSMO 2013 international conference on particle physics and cosmology, which will be held in Cambridge on September 6-2, 2013. Well-known lecturers are expected to take part in the event, including Prof. Hawking, Prof. Brian Cox and Prof. David Spergel, and all of them will give lectures at the event.