Apr 28 2009 Supercomputer To Compete On Jeopardy!
If you haven't heard, an IBM 'Blue Gene' supercomputer is going to compete on Jeopardy! and show us humans just how good for nothing we are. We don't even excel at remembering trivial information! I'll take 'OMG, We're Screwed' for $600, Alex.
The IBM researchers who created Watson -- an homage to IBM founder Thomas J. Watson Sr. -- have said that they are not confident yet that their creation could compete well on the show. The New York Times reports that human champions are able to provide correct response 85% of the time to questions asked.
The computer will offer answers to the question via a synthesized voice and will choose its own follow up categories. IBM says that for the show, the computer would not be connected to the internet. How Watson will be presented and what gender the computer will be are under consideration. A screen and a projected avatar are one consideration.
You know what they should make the computer look like? Alex before he shaved that beautiful stashe of his. Loved that thing. I've even written him several letters asking him to regrow it. What do you say -- one last ride for old times' sake?
IBM Supercomputer to Compete on Jeopardy! [dailytech]
Thanks to Steve, Lisa, Mike, cougar78 and uglybuckling, all of whom could beat Ken Jennings.*
*In a bikini contest.
Jun 10 2008 $100 Million Supercomputer Breaks Petaflop Barrier, Supposed To Keep U.S. Nuclear Weapon Stockpiles Safe And Reliable, Eek!
The $100 Million Roadrunner supercomputer was designed and built by IBM for the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration and is housed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. It was named Roadrunner before that's New Mexico's state bird and because they're fast. Also, Wile E. Coyote is a dipshit.
The Roadrunner is a hybrid machine, the world's first, that uses both traditional computer chips and the Cell Broadband Engine which was designed for the PS3. It occupies 6,000 square feet, weighs 500,000 lbs and delivers world-leading efficiency - 376 million calculations per watt. Roadrunner will be used primarily to ensure the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile (we're all gonna die!). It will also do research into astronomy, energy, human genome science and climate change.
It was the first to perform at a petaflop (one thousand trillion calculations per second), and would make a great secondary computer if I had room for it. Some interesting info from the press release:
In total, Roadrunner connects 6,948 dual-core AMD Opteron® chips (on IBM Model LS21 blade servers) as well as 12,960 Cell engines (on IBM Model QS22 blade servers). The Roadrunner system has 80 terabytes of memory, and is housed in 288 refrigerator-sized, IBM BladeCenter® racks occupying 6,000 square feet. Its 10,000 connections - both Infiniband and Gigabit Ethernet -- require 57 miles of fiber optic cable. Roadrunner weighs 500,000 lbs. Companies that contributed components and technology include; Emcore, Flextronics, Mellanox and Voltaire.
Well that's sweet and all, but the real question is this: Can it handle me watching four or five pornos, playing Crysis, and downloading some movies illegally all at the same time? Hah -- really? Well how about all those things AND writing a nasty email to an ex-girlfirend? Got you there you stupid Roadrunner! WILE E. COYOTE FOR THE -- goddammit.
A video about the computer after the jump, along with links to very in-depth and wordy articles about it.
Sep 10 2007 Supercomputer Does 26 Gigaflops, Is Cheap
Tim Brom of Calvin College built the Microwulf Supercomputer, that flips 26 gigaflops (26 billion double-precision floating point instructions per second) and cost $2,500 to build last year (and would only cost $1,256 to build today).
It consists of four microATX motherboards, each with a dual core CPU and 2 gigs of ram, all connected with an 8-port Gigabit Ethernet switch. The whole shebang also includes a CD/DVD drive and a 250 gb HD, and runs Ubuntu Linux.
I want one. Maybe in a slightly cooler case (like this), and with some, uh, dust protection (like this), and I'd be good to go. Ten points to Tim for the sweet computer, but minus two for having his Matrix poster rolled up in the corner.
One more design picture after the jump.
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