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Pictured, left. What of my old pipe dreams of evil supercomputers who will one day network the minds of humans to satisfy their thirst for memory and processing power, the spinal cords buckling at capacity.
Likely such configurations will be surpassed by quantum computers and the humans will merely serve as data storage. Or more simply, the DNA will be employed for the computing and the humans will be obsolete.
China Joins Supercomputer Elite
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8362825.stm
China has become one of a handful of nations to own one of the top five supercomputers in the world.
Its Tianhe-1 computer, housed at the National Super Computer Center in Tianjin was ranked fifth on the biannual Top 500 supercomputer list.
The machine packs more than 70,000 chips and can compute 563 trillion calculations per second (teraflops).
It is used for petroleum exploration and engineering tasks such as simulating aircraft designs.
However, the fastest machine is the US-owned Jaguar supercomputer, which now boasts a speed of 1.759 petaflops.
One petaflop is the equivalent of 1,000 trillion calculations per second.
I also read about the Sequoia, only slightly slower, which puts usage into context:
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/IBM-Sequoia-Supercomputer,6955.html
"...the Sequoia will not arrive at the government facility until sometime in 2012. The 20 Teraflops speedster will have 1.6 Petabytes (note: 1 Petabyte = over one million gigabytes), connected to its 1.6 million cores. Beyond that, the details are scarce.
So what will the Sequoia be doing? Plotting world domination? Tracking down alien life forms? Its primary purpose will be to calculate nuclear explosions, along with analyzing the entire U.S. nuclear stockpile. The Sequoia was one of four bids considered by the National Nuclear Security Administration and the U.S. Dept. of Energy. "These powerful machines will provide NNSA with the capabilities needed to resolve time-urgent and complex scientific problems, ensuring the viability of the nation's nuclear deterrent into the future," said NNSA administrator Thomas D'Agostino. "This endeavor will also help maintain U.S. leadership in high performance computing and promote scientific discovery."
The Petaflop barrier was originally broken in June of 2008, when IBM announced that its Roadrunner supercomputer would be able to consistently calculate at such a high level. With the Sequoia topping out at around 20Tflops, the bar has been raised tremendously in the span of only seven months.
Analyzing nuclear weapons is all well and good, but we're hoping the scientists in Livermore try running Crysis on this bad boy during their downtime."
So, I wanted to brush up on my prefixes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SI_prefix
10008 1024 yotta Y 1991 Septillion Quadrillion 1000000000000000000000000
10007 1021 zetta Z 1991 Sextillion Trilliard 1000000000000000000000
10006 1018 exa E 1975 Quintillion Trillion 1000000000000000000
10005 1015 peta P 1975 Quadrillion Billiard 1000000000000000
10004 1012 tera T 1960 Trillion Billion 1000000000000
10003 109 giga G 1960 Billion Milliard 1000000000
10002 106 mega M 1960 Million 1 000 000
...and I then found an eccentric post which ventures beyond and on into speculative naming conventions:
http://www.110mb.com/forum/where-do-we-go-to-after-megabytes-giga-tera-peta-exa-zetta-yotta-xona-weka-vunda-t31718.0.html
Giga Tera Peta Exa Zetta Yotta Xona Weka Vunda Uda Treda Sorta Rinta Quexa Pepta Ocha Nena Minga Luma 10 To The Power Of 63 Because I Went As Far As 10 To The Power Of 105
And Named It Alexa Then I Thought This Is Not The End Just The Start So I Carried On And Went To 10 To The Power Of 108 And Named It Venta Then To 10 To The Power Of 111 And Named It Dutra And Then I Realized That Going To Infinity Can Never Be Possible!
What Is My Mind Thinking And Is Anyone Else Out There On This Planet Or Beyond That Is Enquiring Their Mind!
This Is Just The Beginning...
Thanks For Your Input No Matter What!
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