can it beat Gary Kasparov in Chess?? ( possibly the greatest chess player of all time! ) or even conquer Human’s in other classic games like “Go”??
Gary Kasparov proved how intelligent the human mind is by conquering Deep Blue and matching Deep Thought and X3D Fritz.
In 1965, the Russian mathematician Alexander Kronrod said, “Chess is the Drosophila of artificial intelligence.”
These previous SuperComputer’s relied on massive calculation “grunt” ( over 1 million per second ) whilst the human mind struggled to calculate 10 moves ahead but… the human mind had an advantage over the supercomputer by using the Human Brains pattern recognition capabilities.
Will SuperComputer’s ever be capable of matching the human brain?????
Is the Human Brain more intelligent by ‘design’???
How powerfull is the Human Brain compared to these Computers???
What do you think????
IBM’s Blue Gene/L supercomputer has doubled its own performance record by doubling in size; the machine has now performed 135.5 trillion calculations per second
The system, which is in the process of being installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, already topped a list of the 500 fastest supercomputers last November with a sustained performance of 70.7 trillion calculations.
The latest performance increase was achieved by doubling the number of racks in the system to 32. If the design continues on this path, the final machine with 64 racks will perform at about 270 teraflops later this year.
Each rack contains 1,024 processors. So 32 x 1,024 Processors !Each processor, a special variant of IBM’s Power family, has dual-processing engines called cores. For running the basic performance test used to rank the top 500 computers (a test known as Linpack), each core can perform calculation work, but in many tasks one of the cores will be devoted to communications.
Blue Gene began in 2000 as a research project to build a system that could perform 1 quadrillion calculations per second–a petaflop–but IBM is trying to make a business out of the machine. It’s begun selling the Blue Gene/L machines for about $2 million per rack and is renting out access to one of its own machines.
Blue Gene/L is one of several products stemming from IBM’s focus on high-performance technical computing. The company is trying to secure the top spot in the market from Hewlett-Packard and keep its machines ahead of high-end rivals including Silicon Graphics and NEC.
IBM has said the full system will be installed by May, and Livermore Lab spokesman Don Johnston said it should be up and running in July.
Livermore’s Blue Gene/L initially was expected to be used for nonclassified work, but its mission expanded to include weapons research as the lab realized it could be useful there too, Johnston said.
The computer has been used to simulate the interactions of 16 million atoms in a sample of tantalum that’s solidifying under pressure, but Blue Gene/L isn’t suited for all supercomputing tasks.
DOE purchased Blue Gene/L as part of a $290 million deal that also included a system now called ASC Purple. Purple uses fewer, more-powerful processors with more memory, a design that makes it better suited to its primary purpose: complex simulations of nuclear weapons physics.
ASC Purple is based on p5-575 servers. IBM will start delivering ASC Purple to the Livermore lab in April, and it should be complete in July or August, Johnston said.
Specs
Blue Gene At a Glance
Attribute Description Benefit
Processor Power PC 440 700MHz,two per node Lowpower allows dense packaging; better processor-memory balance
Memory 512 MB SDRAM-DDR per node
Networks 3D Torus ? 175 MB/sec in each direction
Collective Network ? 350 MB/sec; 1.5 usec latency
Global Barrier/Interrupt
Gigabit Ethernet (machine control and outside connectivity) Special networks speed up internode communications; designed for MPI programming constructs; improve systems management
Computer nodes Dual processor; 1024 per rack Double FPU improves performance
I/O nodes Dual processor; 16 per rack (additioanl nodes optional) Strengthens systems management
Operating Systems Compute Node ? Lightweight proprietary kernal
I/O Node ? Embedded Linux
Service Node ? SuSE SLES 8 Linux
Front End Nodes ? SuSE SLES 9 Linux Kernel tailored to processor design;
industry-standard distribution
preserves familiarity to end user
Performance Peak per rack (virtual node mode) ? 5.73 teraflops
Peak per rack (coprocessor mode) ? 2.86 teraflops
Linpack per rack (VN mode) ? 4.53 teraflops Highest available performance
benefits capability customers
Power 28.14 KW power consumption per rack (maximum)
208 VAC 3-phase; 100 amp service per rack Lowpower draw enables packaging
Cooling Air conditioning 8 tons/rack (minimum)
2800 CFM (compute rack); 350 CFM (power supplies) Lowcooling requirements enable extreme scale-up
Acoustics 9.0 LwAD and 8.7 LwAm
Dimensions
(include air duct) Height ? 1958mm
Width ? 915mm
Depth ? 915mm
Weight ? 759Kg Design allows “brickwall” layout for better floor space utilization
~~~~~~
Japan is aiming to develop a supercomputer it hopes will be fast enough to help it regain the top spot it lost to U.S. makers last year in an industry that is often seen as a proxy fight for technological supremacy.
The government wants to develop a supercomputer that can handle over a quadrillion calculations per second as early as the fiscal year ending in March 2011, an official at the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology said on Monday.
That would compare with the 135.5 trillion calculations per second in independent tests earlier this year for IBM’s Blue Gene/L, currently the world’s fastest computer, built for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Agency.
Japan’s fastest machine currently is NEC’s Earth Simulator, which boasts nearly 36 trillion calculations per second.
It had been the world’s fastest supercomputer until last year, when it was overtaken by a machine made by SGI and by Blue Gene/L.
The U.S. and Japan have battled for a number of years over supremacy in supercomputers, machines that have massive processing power and which are used in advanced climate forecasting, medical research and other areas.
Japan’s new supercomputer would enable medical researchers to conduct comprehensive simulations on how a medicine is dissolved and carried through a human body and how it affects a specific organ, for example, the ministry official said.
It would also help provide weather forecasts with improved accuracy, the official said.
NEC, Hitachi, the University of Tokyo and Kyushu University were chosen by the ministry earlier this month to develop critical technologies to make the ultra-fast computer possible.
Details such as how much total investment will be needed for the project and which organizations will be involved in the actual development has yet to be decided.
““““““`
“If you were to fully develop the entire tree for all possible chess moves, the total number of board positions is about 1, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000,000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, or 10(power of 120 ), give or take a few. That’s a very big number. For example, there have only been 10( power of 26 )nanoseconds since the Big Bang. There are thought to be only 10( power of 75 ) atoms in the entire universe.
When you consider that the Milky Way galaxy contains billions of suns, and there are billions of galaxies, you can see that that’s a whole lot of atoms. That number is dwarfed by the number of possible chess moves. Chess is a pretty intricate game!
**No computer is ever going to calculate the entire tree. **
What a chess computer tries to do is generate the board-position tree five or 10 or 20 moves into the future.”
and never mind if the Computer’s take over — you will always have Governor Arnie to deal with those ‘beasts’ 🙂
ps I heard it Plays Half Life 2 well 🙂 Will it be our home PC in 10 years? 🙂 🙂