Posted on 06/27/2007 8:09:14 AM PDT by ShadowAce
I was a member of the team that installed #17 at ARL this year.
Sun says they expect to beat IBM with a 1.7 petaflop computer, soon to be released:
http://www.betanews.com/article/Sun_We_Can_Build_a_Faster_Supercomputer_Than_IBM/1182889189
Of course it’s not officially out yet, and we haven’t seen what IBM will do next.
Something a bit awkward sounding about “petaflop” to my ear.
Wow. Looking back 10 years, #1 had just topped one teraflop.
Wow! It seems like yesterday when the 1 teraflop ceiling was shattered - now it’s over 280! Just staggering to contemplate. What I find even more astonishing is the statement, “The average age of a system in the Top500 list is only 1 year and 2 months.”
Is it possible the capacity limit is growing that rapidly or are these units just suffering a proportionally short life span?
I am excited by the rapid increase in capacity and performance and am looking forward to the day when AI systems become smarter than us despite their linear limitations. By then, I hope, we will have the means of linking our “holistic” brains with theirs and get the best of both worlds ...
We have a few WinTel (Windows/Intel) servers that run a several non mission critical apps and they require manpower just to keep them running. With our IBM System i we focus on the business of the Company not just keeping a system available.
What, so we can scan through billions of hours of
network programming???
Does it come with Windows Vista?
Yeah--MS actually has a machine on this list as well--#106, I think. I wonder how well it runs in comparison to the other machines on the list.
BUMP!
Congrats. I'll bet that was interesting work.
How many of the top 500 are some variant of Unix, and how many are some version of windows?
499 are *nix, with 1 windows machines (#106, I think)
Wow, they went up since the last time I remember looking, when they had one cluster down in the 300s. IIRC, it was more expensive than the Virginia Tech Apple system in the Top 10.
Well, according to me 13-year old, he’s smarter than me. Also, if I recall correctly, I believed I was smarter than my father when I was a teenager. So there! lol!
Im guessing worse than 105 and better than 107 ;)
LOL! Of course. But I was thinking more along the lines of reliability and effort rather than raw speed. :)
I know just thought I would poke a little fun at it..
I just looked it up. There are two Windows Compute Cluster systems. I found the one at 106 -- and a client's not even using it! It's a Microsoft project, probably for testing and for publicity.
The other is at 193, in Japan. It's listed in the statistics and spreadsheet as running Windows, but the page itself shows Linux as the OS. I wonder what's going on there.
BTW, nice to see the Virginia Tech Apple cluster is still in the Top 100 after three years. They're getting a lot of mileage out of that relatively inexpensive investment.
Not really, depending on how you define intelligence. All we have to do is program a very powerful computer to be able to truly learn things on its own, reason, make connections. After that the speed at which it can learn could have it surpassing us in intelligence. It's like a gardener doesn't have to create a whole rose bush, he just has to plant the seed.
We would learn a lot of cool things before they took over.
Where I can't see them surpassing us is in creativity and insight, which is where some of our greatest advances come from. The sci-fi computer-based society would probably stagnate when it's collected all the data it could, made all the inferences and connections it could, but doesn't have the creative spark to be able to advance further.
And thus we take over again after we surpass them due to creative advances.
And then we will be stupid enough to build another intelligent machine using our new knowledge, and it all starts over again. We never could learn from history. Just look at all the people espousing communism these days.
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