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cv govardhan
Sep 26, 2011, 9:23:57 PM9/26/11
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The Smartest Computers In The World
IBM's Watson computer astonished the world in February when it won a Jeopardy match against two human contestants.
This week, Watson got a job at WellPoint health insurance as a consultant.
In honor of this, we've re-released our list of the greatest electronic processors on the planet.
Most of these are supercomputers: giant mainframes that link many
small processors to achieve breakneck speeds. In terms of pure speed,
the smartest is China's Tianhe.
But we also looked at computers that are incredibly good at a
certain task. Watson is the best Jeopardy playing computer, just like
there's a best weather predicting computer.
As Ken Jennings said when he was beat out on Jeopardy. "I for one welcome our new computer overlords."
The World's Fifth Fastest Supercomputer
Name: Tsubame 2.0
Date of Creation: 2010
Description: Japan's entry in the supercomputer superpowers is located at The Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) and is 12 times faster than the country's previous champ owned by Japan's National Atomic Energy Agency.
The computer is used by university research students and a small number of independent users in Japan. Using a combination of Microsoft and Linux software, the Tsubame runs at 1.2 peta-flops per second.
The World's Fourth Fastest Supercomputer
Name: Nebulae
Date of Creation: 2009
Description: The Nebulae is also one of the world's most versatile supercomputers. The way it is set up allows it to be reconfigured for different tasks more easily than many other supercomputers.
Located at the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzen, China, the Nebulae runs at 1.27 peta-flops per second.
No word on what the supercomputer is currently working on.
The World's Third Fastest Supercomputer
Image: wikipedia commons
Date of Creation: 2009
Description: America's top supercomputer and the second fastest in the world -- built in 2005 and expanded upon -- achieves 1.75 petaflops per second.
80 percent of Jaguar's resources are assigned to the Department of
Energy's Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and
Experiment (INCITE) project.
The World's Second Fastest Supercomputer
Date of Creation: 2010
Description: China's champ in their bout for supercomputer domination — 2.5 petaflops per-second.
The Tianhe, or Sky River in English, is used to carry out computations for petroleum exploration and aircraft simulation.
It is also available for rent to other countries without their own supercomputers.
The World's Second Fastest Supercomputer
The K Computer
Image: Fujitsu
Date of Creation: 2011
Description: Japan's surpise upset clocks in at — 8.162 petaflops per-second.
At more than three times faster than the Tianhe, the K Computer is Japans first top supercomputer champ since 2004,
At a cost of $1.4 billion, the K took five years to build, is
expected to research disaster prevention, climate change, and
meteorology.
The Next Fastest Supercomputer
Image: IBM
Date of Creation: Operational in 2012
Description: IBM is set to seize the supercomputing crown from China next year with Mira, a 10 peta-flop computer, four times faster that the Tianhe-1A.
Of the 16 selected projects selected for Mira, the Department of
Energy plans to use the computing power for exploring climate change,
designing more efficient electric-car batteries and looking at the
evolution of the universe.
Source: Scientific Computing
The Next Next Fastest Super Computer
Image: IBM
Date of Creation: 2018 - 2020
Description: An exa-scale computer would be 1000 times faster than the fastest supercomputer today and could count every star in the universe in 20 minutes.
The government is so sure of the technology's arrival that the 2012
federal budget has allocated $126 million for the purchase of exa-scale
computing.
The concept was unrealistic enough prior to IBM's new chip that
last year "extreme scale computing" was allocated only $24 million in
2011.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has already
placed orders for prototypes of this computer with Intel and NVidia. The
possibilities for expanded oil discovery, climate understanding and
financial stability are much anticipated.
The World's Best Desktop Computer
Date of Creation: 2011
Description: It's got to be good because it costs up to $18,667.
The fully customized Falcon Mach V desktop PC comes with multiple
video cards, 24G hard drive space and state-of-the-art processors and
graphics cards, and can hook up to half a dozen monitors. It is the
fastest computer for gamers, displaying 60 frames per second in high-res video.
The Fastest Computer To Ever Play Chess
Date of Creation: 1997
Description: This is the machine that took down chess master Garry Kasparov 1997.
After losing 4-2 in a best of six tournament to Kasparov in 1996,
"Deeper Blue" won the rematch 3.5-2.5. Kasparov always claimed the
computer cheated in the deciding match and demanded a rematch, but the
IBM declined, packed up the machine and retained bragging rights.
In pure speed Deep Blue could reach only 11.38 gigaflops, but
devoted this computing power entirely to chess calculations, calculating
up to 20 moves in the future.
The World's Best Chess Playing Computer
Image: Rybka
Name: Deep Rybka 3
Date of Creation: 2011
Description: Actually, the world's best chess playing computer is pretty much any machine you're sitting in front of right now. It's the software that is revolutionary and constantly evolving.
Deep Rybka 3, developed by International Chess Master Vasik Rajlich, has been the top rated engine on the chess engine ratings list several years running. The program has a 3227 ELO rating, compared to the highest human rating of 2814.
The World's Best Supercomputers For Weather And Climate Prediction
Image: NOAA
Date of Creation: 2009
Description: Used by the National Weather Service
to "improve forecast accuracy and extend lead times for severe weather,
including hurricanes, tornadoes, air quality, wildfires, floods,
tsunamis and winter storms."
In pure speed Stratus can reach about 0.07 petaflops.
The World's Best Jeopardy Playing Computer
Image: IBM
Date of Creation: 2010
Description: The Jeopardy champ, beat two of the game show's superstars to set a new bar in Artificial Intelligence.
Watson is such a breakthrough, in part, because it pulls together
random pieces of random to provide specific answers based upon a
complexly worded clue -- in short, it's the first computer that thinks
much like humans do.
Watson was also organizing answers on its own, without any operator assistance.
The World's Best Networked Supercomputer
Image: UTK
Date of Creation: 2010
Description: The Kraken, at the National Institute
for Computational Sciences and University of Tennessee Knoxville,
allows scientists and researchers around the world the opportunity to
share the revelations of high-powered processing.
The Kraken, named after the mythological sea-monster, is a key part of the TeraGrid XD program offering underserved communities, like smaller colleges and universities, supercomputer access and opportunity.
The World's Most "Hollywood" Supercomputer
Image: TMC
Date of Creation: 1991
Description: The supercomputer featured in Jurassic Park (Remember the island control room?).
The CM-5 in the film is one of only two built by the Thinking
Machine Company -- one is at Los Alamos and the other, in the movie, was
sold to the NSA. The LED lights showed processing node usage and could
also be used for diagnostics purposes.
The film crew used mirrors to make it appear there were more CM-5's in the room than there actually were.
This computer can achieve 65.5 gigaflops of computations per second.
The World's Fastest Supercomputer You'll Hear Nothing About
Image: IBM
Date of Creation: 2012
Description: In 2009 the
Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)
ordered a 20 peta-flop computer to work on the nations aging nuclear
deterrent inventory.
According to a statement by IBM, Sequoia is part of NNSA's
Stockpile Stewardship programme "to help continue to ensure the safety
and reliability of the nation's aging nuclear deterrent."
This top secret mission could be why there are no mentions of the project after the contract was ordered in 2009.
But with the arrival of Mira, IBM's 10 peta-flop computer right on
schedule, it seems safe to assume Sequoia will be delivered on time as
well.
Source: ZDNet
The Biggest Supercomputer Breakthrough
Image: Intel
Date of Creation: 2010
Description: The chip was 10 years in development
and communicates with pulses of light rather than electrical signals,
using the fusion of optical technology and semiconductor technology. It
heralds in the generation of exa-scale computing, the generation that
will follow the current peta-scale.
The chip technology doesn't necessarily negate Moore's Law, whereby
the number of transistors and resistors on a chip doubles every 18/24
months, it rewrites it.
The CMOS chip is expected to provide up to 20 times more
computational power every five years. On top of that, the chip will
create computers 1000 times faster than the fastest computer today: one
million trillion calculations—or an Exa-flop—in a single second.
The Next Biggest Supercomputer Breakthrough
Date of Creation: January 2011 - still testing
Description: In theory, quantum computers would be
able to process infinite computations across multiple "dimensions". It
would be a computer with, literally, unlimited power and capacity.
The quantum computer took a step closer to reality in January when
Oxford University physicists unveiled a successful test of a quantum
chip. The successful creation of a quantum computer would instantly
change computing, and how physicists interact with the universe.
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