Need more hardware to keep outpacing IBM

[Zagen30]

IBM is planning to build a 10 PFLOPS Supercomputer

We must increase our numbers to keep outpacing the field. I rather like being part of the most powerful computing effort in the world; we can't let Skynet... er IBM beat us!

[Phantom2487]

Someone persuade IBM to run FAH on it when it's not processing

[Qinsp]

Well before IBM had to prove their supercomputer by playing chess. Now it will have to play Farmsville...

[Qinsp]

Histerical (sic) reference: When Deep Blue played chess in 1997, it was the 259th most powerful computer in the world at 11 gflops, or about 1/2 as powerful as an AMD 1100T desktop processor.

[bruce]

Moore's law at work.

Let's see, 13 years is ~9 * 18 months.

Today, a desktop system with (half of) an 1100T might be worth $1000 on the open market. Multiply by 2^9 means IBM should have paid about $500 000 for Deep Blue.

No way.

They spent A LOT more on it than that, but they were spending out of both their research budget and their marketing budget and it didn't really matter what it cost. Besides, competitive pricing works to drive down the cost of lots of things, but not research or marketing projects. Just look at the bargain that we're getting.

[warmon6]

P.S. Have all of the Windows 7 users out there installed Service Pack 1 yet? The PC runs a lot smoother with this new service pack.

Not for all

Seams some people are having issues with the SP 1.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/window ... 12376.html

[bruce]

Darn. They'll probably have to put out an SP2. I can't understand how something can work so well on one computer, and so badly on another. There just can't be that much difference between computers! After all, they have to conform to some sort of standards.

You'd be amazed at how different two computers can be. Every possible device driver and almost every piece of software you install changes the Windows registry. The number of possible variations in registry configurations may not technically be infinite, but that number is well beyond our imagination.

That sort of puts a different perspective on the complaints that we see when Stanford's tiny development group takes as long as it does to get a total rewrite of the FAH client ready to distribute in a form that will run on all those Windows7 machines plus on all other recent versions of Windows, plus a number of distros of Linux plus OS-X ...

Didn't Microsoft provide an automatic migration program that made it possible to upgrade from Vista to Seven more or less like upgrading to SP1? I think this was the first time they EVER had a migration tool that was supposed to work. I remember many times installing a manor version upgrade which required lots and lots of backup/restore steps and driver update steps and once you think you've got everything, you discover that some application left data files in some really obscure corner of the old OS and you can't find them on the backup.

[uncle fuzzy]

I've only tried to install W7 SP1 on 2 computers (32-bit laptop, 64-bit desktop). They both failed, repeatedly. One of these days I'll follow-up on the error code to see what the problem is.

[WoodburyMan]

I've installed SP1 on close to 20 completely different machines, no issues whatever except for one where *someone* accidentally hit the power button with their elbow for a few seconds mid install....

[7im]

At the rate this problem is evolving, by 2021 no one, not even the designers, may be able to explain or understand how a computer works. They could become the most singularly complex machines/electronics humans have ever built, and that doesn't include the very complex software. When that point arrives, what will we do? How will we be able to interface with, or even operate a computer? How will we trouble shoot or repair them? Will we even know when there's a malfunction? Will any one person have the knowledge base to work with computers?

If a human can build it, we can repair it.

But by 2021, computers will be even more commoditized. Computers, in whatever form they take, will be like a toaster, when it breaks, you pull the quantum memory chip out, and throw the PC away, er, upcycle it. Then you buy a new PC out of the vending machine in the break room, put your chip back in the PC, and re-establish the BlueFang wireless cranial uplink. Fixed.

Oh, crap. I probably broke about 20 NDAs there.

[bruce]

You're not breaking those NDAs. You won't even sign them until 2019, at the earliest.

[the animal]

P.S. Have all of the Windows 7 users out there installed Service Pack 1 yet? The PC runs a lot smoother with this new service pack.

I had no issue installing but noticed zero difference.