Infinite Computing Power

jwellsy

What would you do with infinite computing power?

Next week I'm going to a three day conference at the National Center for Supercomputing Aplications NCSA at the University of Illinois. That's where the original HAL computer was built, The first web browser and now they are building the first pentascale computer. This one computer is designed to require 30 Megawatts of electricity to run.

Anyway one of the themes of this years conference is the implications of unlimited computing power. It should be a good time. These conferences have been great in the past.

From the registration confirmation email:

Magicman

In what respect would the computer power be infinite? Would it have something to do with processor abilities or speeds? This seems to be the case because abilities in other respects would seems to be an issue of program.

Arnie

We would be able to run a computational model of the complete human body at atomic scale in realtime or faster. Currently it takes about a day to simulate one protein for 10 ns and that's without using quantum mechanical computations.

jwellsy

Here's a new email I received with live webinar info.

jwellsy

WOW, what a great conference. Some of the greatest minds in the world were there. The keynote topics ranged from the state of present day leadership class High Performance Computing HPC projects to the influence of HPC on future global international economy dynamics.

As far as artificial intelligence goes the vast majority of HPC is dedicated to performing batch jobs to find an answer to a problem and not machine autonomy. There is a project called Blue Brain in Sweden that is attempting to mathematically model every aspect of the human brain. At the University of Illinois there's a project called Blue Dolphin that models real time decision making in a multi physics and multi disciple environments.

I found it interesting that Moore's Law that implies that computing power doubles approximately every 2 years seems to have petered out on processor clock speed improvements because of the heat generated. That's why they started making dual and quad core chips. These cores are the basic building block of HPC. They the same kinds of chips that home pc's use. They just use a whole lot more of them. The one at UI will have about 250,000 cores. They can process 10 to the 15th power of actions called flops per second and called petaflop computers. and they are already starting to talk about exaflop (10 to the 18th power) computers.

Invidea has exponentially surpassed Intel in the number of chips being used in the world. Many of these projects are using Invidea GPU chips. But, they don't like to call them Graphical Processors. They are called General Purpose Units (but, they're the same thing).

It's not the hardware that is limiting computers. It's software development business models that bound and direct the future of computers. Colleges need to start teaching multi physics parallel propramming. That's what industry needs to maintain a competitive advantage in a global economy.

The neatest thing I saw was the next generation of television. The first time I saw true HDTV years ago I was so blown away it made me suck wind. Well, I had the same reaction to this new technology. It's called 4K. It stands for the picture data resolution being 4 thousand pixels wide. But, what makes it so outstanding is that there are two images superimposed into one image. One image is biased to a right hand polarization and the other image is biased to a left hand polarization. You wear a pair special glasses that split the image back into right and and left data streams to create the most stunning 3D effect you can imagine. Remember the first time you ever looked into a kids viewmaster? This is like a giant immersive viewmaster. I watched this for half an hour sitting on a couch maybe 10 feet from a 12 foot wide screen. When the 3D objects would come towards you they appeared so close that several time I had to stick my hand out to try and catch them or deflect their flight paths. Stars would literally float in mid air between me and the screen. It was unbelievable.

It was a pretty good place to do some networking too. I've already been offered an opportunity for several technical writing gigs from it. It's probably more of an ego boost to write things that impact this scale of projects than it is financialy rewarding. It pays the bills. But, it still feels almost like a job

classicevony

With all that power I'd hook it up to the toaster, maybe that'll get my toast out unburnt!

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