Oak Ridge

I read this morning at reference 1 that the US has jumped into the lead in the race to build the world's biggest computer, pipping the last Chinese effort by a margin of 200 to 125. With the very serious looking server floor being snapped left. Even more serious than C&W at Windmill Hill, at Swindon, or Fujitsu at West Thurrock. These last being the biggest that I ever visited.

I quote: 'Summit - the world’s most powerful supercomputer, with a peak performance of 200,000 trillion calculations per second, or 200 petaflops peak performance - was announced June 8 by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) [noticed at reference 4]. The previous leading supercomputer was China’s Sunway TaihuLight [noticed at reference 3], with 125 petaflops peak performance. Summit will enable researchers to apply techniques like machine learning and deep learning to problems in human health such as genetics and cancer, high-energy physics (such as astrophysics and fusion energy), discovery of new materials, climate modeling, and other scientific discoveries that were previously impractical or impossible, according to ORNL. “It’s at least a hundred times more computation than we’ve been able to do on earlier machines,” said ORNL computational astrophysicist Bronson Messer'.

PS 1: the place where I thought Fujitsu was at West Thurrock is now labelled 'Amazon Logistics DRM2', whatever that might be.

PS 2: I wonder how long it will be before someone feels able to express the power of the brain in petaflops. Or will it turn out that the two sorts of machine - brains and computers - are not commensurate in that way?

Reference 1: http://www.kurzweilai.net/.

Reference 2: http://kurzweil.com/newsletter/. A confusion with a Chinese connection. But quite possibly related, nonetheless. Can't be too careful these days.

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2016/06/big-computer.html.

Reference 4: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/07/hot-afternoon.html. Will there be another opportunity to visit?