IBM Challenges Jeopardy Contestants

First it was Gary Kasparov, now Alex Trebek. IBM's newest game-playing super computer (named Watson) is set to compete against human contestants in the game show Jeopardy. These occasional publicity stunts are a great way to bring awareness to the huge strides in the field of artificial intelligence.

Compared to chess (in which IBM's Deep Blue defeated Kasparov), Jeopardy is a much different challenge and will tax Watson's grasp on the nuances of the English language. Thus far Watson's performance has been mixed:

For example, given the statement, “Bordered by Syria and Israel, this small country is only 135 miles long and 35 miles wide,” Watson beat its human competitors by quickly answering, “What is Lebanon?”

Moments later, however, the program stumbled when it decided it had high confidence that a “sheet” was a fruit.

Jaguar Fast On Roadrunner's Tail, Both Smash Petaflop Barrier

I love that IBM named its newest supercomputer "Roadrunner" (mentioned in a July post). I also like how the good people at Cray have airbrushed a sweet design down the side of their massive Jaguar computing system. In November both the Roadrunner and Jaguar smashed the petaflop barrier (1,000,000,000,000,000 calculations every second) with Roadrunner clocking in just faster than Jaguar (1.105 vs. 1.059 quadrillion calculations per second). Researchers are excited about the accomplishment, saying that these supercomputers are literally creating an opportunity for simulation as a third branch of science. The power of these computers to simulate nature simply can't be ignored they say, and the scientific method must be revised to grant simulation a more important role.
On another note, according to the Wired article, Raymond Kurzweil believes the human brain has a power of 10 petaflops. By Kurzweil's reckoning, we should equal the human brain's calculating power in less than 7 years.

Building The Brain Computer

Researchers at Stanford, Cornell and Columbia, and IBM, are engaged in the ambitious project of reverse engineering the human mind using nanoscale transistors. Full story at Wired.

Beme: Supercomputer Update

Supercomputers stand on the frontline of processing capacity. They are used to understand the most complex problems facing humanity today, such as, the consequences of global warming, the danger from nuclear stockpiles, and the nature of biophysical systems. The fastest supercomputer in the world is IBM’s Roadrunner.

BlueGene/L laid the foundation

Created by IBM and the United States Department of Energy, Blue Gene/L held the world's fastest computer title from November 2004 to June 2008, when it was surpassed by Roadrunner. BlueGene/L two main goals are: to advance understanding of the mechanism behind protein folding and to explore novel ideas in massively parallel machine architecture and software. BlueGene’s creators and collaborators are exploring a growing list of applications including financial modeling and quantum chemistry.






Roadrunner becomes world’s fastest computer

Created by IBM for the U.S. Department of Energy to calculate and monitor the risk of aging nuclear stockpiles, Roadrunner became the fastest computer in May by achieving a speed record of 1.026 petaflops (a petaflop is 1000 trillion instructions per second). Roadrunner’s architecture essentially consists of 13,000 advanced Sony Playstation III processors in addition to 7,000 AMD Opteron Processors. This hybrid processor system makes Roadrunner different from other supercomputers that tend to run on one processing system. The hybrid system allows Roadrunner to delegate computing tasks to either one of the two systems, resulting in more efficient overall processing.




Anton poised to leapfrog other supercomputers

Recent reports claim that the privately funded Anton supercomputer nears completion and has the potential to leapfrog the current supercomputer processing capacity by as much as a half decade. The Anton developers aim to investigate the folding of protein molecules to aid in the design of drugs that simulate the biological activity of different molecules. Anton will possess massive parallelism (512 specialized processors working together) and while BlueGene/L can only simulate molecular interactions about a femtosecond long (one billionth of one millionth of a second), Anton will have the capacity to look at much longer timescales with the hope of discovering new kinds of biological processes that would not otherwise be observable.