BlueGeneP
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Supercomputer cracks sixty-trillionth binary digit of Pi-squared, gets beaten up by normal computers
Pencils down, everyone. IBM's "BlueGene/P" supercomputer has beaten you to the sixty-trillionth binary digit of Pi-squared after only a few months -- at one quadrillion calculations per second. Running thousands of independent processors, the number-crunching monster accomplished what would have taken a single CPU 1,500 years. A cloud-computing effort last year calculated Pi itself out to the two-quadrillionth digit, but you may wonder why this all matters. "What is interesting in these computations is that until just a few years ago, it was widely believed that such mathematical objects were forever beyond the reach of human reasoning or machine computation," said one researcher, "Once again we see the utter futility in placing limits on human ingenuity and technology." So there's that. But in all the commotion no one seems to have announced whether the landmark digit was a one or a zero: all you betting on the outcome will have to dig deeper into the source link.
IBM's Watson is really smart, will try to prove it on Jeopardy! this fall (video)
As much as we love our Google homepage, computer search remains a pretty rudimentary affair. You punch in keywords and you get only indirect answers in the form of relevant web results. IBM doesn't seem to be too happy with this situation and has been working for the past three years on perfecting its Watson supercomputer: an array of server racks that's been endowed with linguistic algorithms allowing it to not only recognize oddly phrased or implicative questions, but to answer them in kind, with direct and accurate responses. Stuffed with encyclopedic knowledge of the world around it, it answers on the basis of information stored within its data banks, though obviously you won't be able to tap into it any time soon for help with your homework. The latest word is that Watson's lab tests have impressed the producers of Jeopardy! enough to have the bot participate in a televised episode of the show. That could happen as early as this fall, which fits right in line with our scheduled doom at robots' hands by the end of 2012. Ah well, might as well get our popcorn and enjoy the show.
IBM's Watson to rival humans in round of Jeopardy!
IBM's already proven that a computer from its labs can take on the world's best at chess, but what'll happen when the boundaries of a square-filled board are removed? Researchers at the outfit are obviously excited to find out, today revealing that its Watson system will be pitted against brilliant Earthlings on Jeopardy! in an attempt to further artificial intelligence when it comes to semantics and searching for indexed information. Essentially, the machine will have to be remarkably labile in order to understand "analogies, puns, double entendres and relationships like size and location," something that robotic linguists have long struggled with. There's no mention of a solid date when it comes to the competition itself, but you can bet we'll be setting our DVRs whenever it's announced. Check out a video of the progress after the break.[Via The New York Times]
IBM's Sequoia: 20x faster than the world's fastest supercomputer
Roadrunner? Pfff, your chart-topping 1.105 petaflops are laughable. IBM just announced its 20-freaking-petaflop Sequoia supercomputer due for delivery by 2012. While supercomputer speeds have steadily increased year-over-year, a near 20x jump in calculations per second since the last world ranking is unheard of, even if the system has yet to come on-line. Slated to spend its life simulating nuclear explosions, Sequoia will use 45-nm (PowerPC, presumably) processors with 16 cores per chip for as many as 4,096 processors per rack. That's a total of 1.6 million cores assisted by 1.6 petabytes of memory. Perhaps all this processing power might help IBM understand the futility of its Lotus Notes strategy.
