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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This morning I received the wonderful news that I’ve won the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence - Canada Academic Prize for 2008!
The award is in “recognition of [my] efforts to improve AI theory” and is worth CAD $10,000.  This will certainly help my budget over the next two years while I study at the Gatsby [...]

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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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Currently the foremost thinker on the ethics and safety of artificial general intelligence is Eliezer Yudkowsky of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence.  On a few occasions I have tried to read some of his writings on this topic.  Every time, however, I would give up after about ten pages.  I found the ideas [...]

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I don’t trust philosophical arguments all that much. I think this comes from studying mathematics. To start with I try to see or feel a result and I then use this to either understand the essence of an existing proof, or to give me guidance in constructing a proof myself. I remember [...]

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After all this time, I’m finally getting to the stage of knowing enough to know how much I don’t know.  Or in Rumsfeld’s lexicon: unknown unknowns are slowly becoming known unknowns.  Equations, theorems and whole sub-fields of study that I’d previous heard mentioned, or that I’d studied and largely forgotten as they didn’t seem useful, [...]

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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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