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Most
Powerful Supercomputers: Brains and Beauty

"QUANTUM SHOT" #527
Link
- article by M.
Christian and A.
Abrams

"Computers in the
future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons."
-
Popular Mechanics (1949)

In Isaac Asimov's
classic story, "The Last Question," a supercomputer is,
again and again, asked how to deal with the eventual
heat death of universe. After upgrade upon upgrade, it
finally has an answer -- but, alas, no one is left to
hear it, because the universe has ended. So it simply
states its answer out loud: "Let there be light."

(imaginary computing colossus by Bruce
Zick)

Put another way, imagine that
sometime in the future someone asks the
smart-machine-to-end-all-smart-machines: "Is there a
God," and said machine answers, "There is
now."

an interesting juxtaposition of alien tech and
religion, image via)

------------

Early Supercomputers

What exactly qualifies as the earliest example of a
"computer" is a matter of debate: some say the abacus
while others point to the Antikythera mechanism, and
still others push the calendar up to the 1800s with
Charles Babbage's difference engine. Whatever their
origins, though, with the advent of the digital
revolution, computers have truly become super.

One of the first early super computers has to be Konrad Zuse's series of machines.
Created in 1930s and 40s, they were one of the very
first computers to be programmable as well as
multi-function.

The Z1 computer. In the foreground is the
manual crank for driving the clock frequency by hand. -
source

The Z1 computer in the living room of Konrad
Zuse's parents in 1936

Konrad Zuse was
also a painter - he used the pseudonym Kuno See, and had
a number of major exhibitions:

(images credit: epemag.com)

Soon after, the Brits, needing some serious
number-crunching during the war, built the aptly named
Colossus -- which was smashed to bits in the name
of secrecy when its job was done.

(images via)

Harvard Mark-I in use, 1944 - a room-sized,
relay-based calculator. via

Not that America also wasn't up to the task: the U.S.
had its own long line of increasingly sophisticated, and
powerful, devices. First there was the Model K,
then the ABC, followed by the Automatic
Sequence Controlled Calculator, and then came
ENIAC.

(images via)

ENIAC was considered state of the art, a true electronic
brain capable of astounding feats of calculation. Now,
alas, we can do the same things that ENIAC could with a
cheap throwaway calculator. But in 1943, ENIAC was the
tops.

After ENIAC came EDVAC, a change of
much more than a few letters. Created by the brilliant
John von Neumann, this series of
computers was a monumental leap forward in computational
ability, flexibility, and speed.

(images via)

On a side note, as early 1945 or so, computers gave us
the term "bug" for a problem with a machine. Coined by
Grace Hopper, because -- quite literally -- a moth got
caught in the circuitry.

------------

Bigger and smarter
machines

The 60s, and the age of the
transistor, gave us bigger and smarter machines. Lead
by master builders like IBM, these machines became
behemoths of blinking lights and whirling tape reels,
able to handle the chaos of weather prediction as well
as tax records with the greatest -- for the most part --
of ease.

(original unknown)

------------

Human chess players rendered
obsolete in 6 games

But supercomputers
seriously came into their own when they challenged ...
well, okay, their "handlers" allowed them to challenge …
man at his own game: namely chess.

The
first human vs. machine challenge is also up for debate
as more than likely a few early programmers tried their
hands at defeating their own creations and even pitting
computers against computers. Transistors, though,
quickly became superior to squishy human brains. In
1981 Cray Blitz took the crown from Joe Sentef, and then
in 1988 Deep
Thought managed to share the glory with Tony Miles
-- though some suspect the machine felt a tiny bit sorry
for Tony and so allowed him to join it in the winner's
circle. This suspicion is probably incorrect, however,
as Garry Kasparov, who felt no such sympathy, actually
beat the machine in two games. But In 1997, Deep
Blue avenged its mechanical sibling and stomped
Kasparov in six games. Ouch!

What really hurts is that humans now regularly lose to
their computational betters. The question today is
whether they'll even let us fleshy beings sit at the
same table with them, let alone deem us worthy to play
with them.

(imaginary) teckno-assemblages by Bruce
Zick

------------

MareNostrum - a perfect
combination of beauty as well as brains

What's really interesting about the new generation of
super machines is not that they're smart -- which they
most definitely are -- but how, well, sexy they've
gotten.

(image courtesy of Barcelona Supercomputing
Center)

Just take a look at MareNostrum, which is a perfect
combination of beauty as well as brains. Sure, the
monster machine that lives in a deconsecrated chapel in
Barceolona, might be only (ahem) the 8th most powerful
of its super-smart digital kin, but it's certainly a
star in the looks department: a series of imposing
monoliths set inside a climate-controlled glass room, a
perfect juxtaposition between its 21st century mind and
the ancient architecture of the chapel. It's been used
for everything from climate modeling to helping decipher
the human genome -- all the while looking fantastic as
it works.

From the outside: the Torre Girona
chapel -

Inside: human cutting-edge technoogy meets the deep
reverence of spiritual architecture -

(images credit: Ronald
Halbe and Simon
Norfolk)

The
supercomputer consists of 2560 JS21 blade computing
nodes, each with 2 dual-core IBM 64-bit PowerPC 970MP
processors running at 2.3 GHz for 10240 CPUs in total.
It has 20 TB of RAM and 280 TB of external disk storage
for more persistent storage.

This page lists other powerful
supercomputers in the world (which are publicly
known).

------------

The fastest
supercomputer is to be built for... games and
movies

The future of gaming and cinema seems
to be the "AMD
Fusion Render Cloud".

"AMD has a long track
record in the supercomputing world. Seven out of 10 of
the world's fastest machines, including the fastest two
computers on the planet, are powered by AMD hardware,"
said CEO Dirk Meyer. "Today, AMD is pleased to announce
a new kind of supercomputer unlike any other ever built.
It is being designed to break the one petaflop barrier,
and to process a million compute threads across more
than 1,000 graphics processors."

HD cloud computing concept: "Imagine playing the most
visually intensive first-person shooter game at the
highest image quality settings on your cellphone without
ever having to download and install the software, or use
up valuable storage space or battery life with
compute-intensive tasks."

Here is a detailed view
of the robot used in the new AMD Cinema 2.0 demo (watch
it here)

(images credit: AMD)

Meyer claimed that the AMD Fusion Render Cloud will be
the fastest graphics supercomputer ever built,
and will be ready in the latter half of 2009. "Once
rendered and stored in this cloud environment, the data
can be compressed and streamed in real time over a
wireless or broadband connection to devices such as
smartphones and ultra-thin notebooks."

------------

Computers need humans... and lots
of water

Even the most optimistic of
futurists know that it's just a matter of decades, or
even just a few years, before we see our creations
surpass us. All we can hope is that they look down on
us poor, flesh-and-blood humans with affection -- or
simply with benign indifference. Here is proof that
humans might still be needed for some, even if very
minor, tasks:

Supercomputers also require lots of water for cooling.
Here is a very impressive video of the water-cooled
"Thinking Machines" model CM-5 supercomputers... "Drink
up, me hearties, yo ho!"

Link

Also Read:
Stunningly
intricate Kurta mechanical calculators
Cool
Computer Case Mods, in 2 parts
Weird
use of Laptops

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Link......+StumbleUpon
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YOUR COMMENTS::

10 Comments:

Anonymous said...

When it rained, the female operators of Colossus would strip to
their underwear and hang their clothes do dry beside the hot
machine. The building became a popular destination for the
military's teenage messenger boys. Possibly the first association
of computers with p*rn.

___

brooksmoses said...

Oh, not this again. Grace Hopper didn't invent the term "bug",
as you can pretty clearly tell if you look up the scans of the
relevant log page (with preserved bug!) that are available online,
and imagine why a person might write "First known case of an
actual bug!" next to it.

What happened was, of course, that
"bug" was a well-established term at the time (as any sufficiently
detailed dictionary should confirm), but this was the first time
it had been an actual bug rather than just a metaphor --
and Ms. Hopper, being a computer geek, found this funny enough to
actually tape the bug into the official logbook.

It
wouldn't have been nearly that funny if it were just a bug in the
relay, without being the physically-realized pun. It would have
just been, eww, smushed bug. And she couldn't have known that
"the first bug" would be worth recording.

___

Nope said...

Very good feature, indeed.

But some facts are a bit
obsolete:
The Mare Nostrum is on actually on place 40
, not eight.
An up-to-date list is available at
http://www.top500.org/

Cheers
Nope

___

Tom
said...

Nicely written article. However, in your introduction, when
you "paraphrase" Asimov's "The Last Question", you should have
cited Fredric Brown's one-page story, "Answer" (Is there a
God?/Yes, now there is a god), which had been written five years
before Asimov's story.

___

thrax said...

The video has a Cray in tradition to a Thinking Machine, as you
can see from the nameplate on the coolant expansion
tower.

Both models are obsolete. In fact Thinking Machines
were never took off in the first place, although they seemed like
a cool idea.

___

Tobbi said...

Nice article.

___

Anonymous said...

How can one mention Asimov’s Multivac in reference to the
ultimate in fictional Supercomputer and not in the train of
thought bring up Douglas’ Deep Thought…. I mean seriously Deep
Thought was the size of a planet, had its own gravity, and only
took 10 million years to determine that the answer to Life the
Universe and everything was 42. Multivac on the other had does
get props for consuming all the energy in the universe on the whim
of two drunken sysops.

___

Tonyo
said...

The first chess computer was probably that built by Spanish
engineer Leonardo Torres-Quevedο. You can see photos of
it here
and here

___

Fran said...

The best of all is MareNostrum at Barcelona Computing Centre. A
prefct combination of computing and arquitecture.

___

leo said...

The MareNostrum is the best.
I believe the spanish must be
proud of their exotic yet powerful supercomputer.
Talking about
powerful, I'm not even have used my small laptop to its maximum capacity.

___

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a Comment

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