vetta project

Remember when I was raving about nVidia’s new GTX 280 graphics card that crunches 1 Tera FLOPS?
Yeah, well, that was 3 weeks ago.
Today, Radeon’s new HD 4870 X2 graphics card has 1600 stream processors that crunch 2.4 Tera FLOPS.

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While The Register isn’t the most reliable source, the time frame and specs look about right so I figure this article probably isn’t too far off.
Name: IBM Blue Waters
Peak performance: 1016 FLOPS
RAM: 620 TB
Location: University of Illinois
Delivery: 2011
For every synapse in an adult human brain this machine will have around 6 bytes of RAM and [...]

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In 2006, a computer capable of 3 T FLOPS was enough to get onto the list of the top 500 super computers in the world.
Two years later…
This PC has 3 nVidia GTX 280 graphics cards, costs about $3,000 and is rated at 3 T FLOPS.

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If Roadrunner is a bit beyond your budget, simulating neural networks with GPUs might be an option:

The next generation of Nvidia GPUs will support enhancements such as double precision floating point in order to make them more suitable for general purpose highly parallel computation. There will also be cards with no graphics interface [...]

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According to this article the Roadrunner supercomputer has now reached a Petaflop.  Although it doesn’t sound like an official benchmark result yet, given that the International Supercomputing Conference starts in a week I guess the timing of the article is deliberate and an official position on the Top 500 supercomputers list will follow.
Next milestone…. 1016 [...]

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Just read an interesting little article on graphene transistors. I’d never even heard of them before, apparently it’s the stuff that’s in your pencil. Anyway, with a bit of work you can make amazing transistors with it.
…electrons move through graphene with almost no resistance, generating little heat. What’s more, graphene is itself a [...]

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Once again Kurzweil has hit the mainstream media: this time an article on the BBC. It’s currently the “most emailed” article on the website, so it’s getting a good share of attention. Although he influenced me strongly many years ago, I’m not a big fan of his writings since 2000. In my [...]

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I was just looking at the famous 1997 article When will computer hardware match the human brain? by Hans Moravec. The article made bold predictions about what the future would be like based on the continued exponential growth in computer performance. As my own interest in AGI was founded on these ideas, and [...]

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