Current Commentary
Computing gains still amaze many
By Scott R. Burnell, UPI Science Correspondent
Even though computer researchers fell short of meeting science-fiction's prediction of an artificial intelligence such as Hollywood's HAL by 2001, their achievements in 2002 are more than enough to astound even this jaded computer veteran.
SC2002, this year's look at the state of high-performance computing and networking, was filled with booth after booth of processor clusters, monster banks of hard drives and data links literally working at the speed of light.
One system ran a speech-to-text program during the main sessions, quick enough to catch its own mistakes as a speaker provided more examples of his or her use of language, even heavily accented voices.
Those developments, however, come across as just so much silicon compared with the focus of discussion at the Baltimore Convention Center on Thursday morning -- Japan's Earth Simulator.
That title is no idle boast.
The Supercomputer of the Rising Sun has run away with the title of World's Fastest Supercomputer for months. Those who compile the rankings expect the system to stay on top for the next couple of years, at least.
How fast? Try four times faster than No. 2, a U.S. system meant to help manage the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile. Try faster than the next five supercomputers combined.
That level of performance goes into accurately modeling activity in the entire planet's atmosphere or on the ocean surface, taken as 10-kilometer square chunks. It bears repeating -- the Earth Simulator's results closely match actual measurements around the globe, for months. Compare that with the weather computer at your local TV station, having trouble giving you a solid idea of how much sun you'll see next week.
I sat in awe at SC2002 as the Earth Simulator's director-general, Tetsuya Sato, played movies of the system's output. I knew beforehand what was going to appear, but the first thing I thought was: "Hey, that's a series of real satellite images." The output, showing atmospheric activity everywhere, is that good.
Sato said he hoped the system's future versions
could even predict earthquakes. From the performance I saw, it
appears his professional modesty was the only thing keeping him
from saying it would indeed do that.
I've worked on, programmed and reported on computers for two decades,
but Sato put up raw facts about the Earth Simulator that still
made my jaw drop. Although computer-makers boast about having
shrunk the original ENIAC computer onto a single chip, the Japanese
system has gone the opposite direction, taking up a building similar
in size to an indoor football practice field.
Don't try to listen to a radio in the presence of the Earth Simulator -- the building's exterior is designed to prevent any electromagnetic radiation from reaching the system.
Each of the system's 5,120 processors can perform 8 billion complex mathematical operations every second, making the hottest Pentium on the drawing board look like a horse-drawn cart.
The simulator's 640 clusters of processors, or nodes, are each capable of transferring 16 gigabytes of data -- roughly equivalent to the entire contents of an average home personal computer -- each second across 1,800 miles of cables.
Although your desktop at work or home usually manipulates about 128 million bytes of data in its memory, the Earth Simulator juggles 10 trillion bytes at once, drawing from storage systems holding about 700 trillion bytes in easily accessible locations and 1.6 quadrillion bytes overall.
Earlier computer simulations, as accurate as they've been, were limited to looking at just a piece of an overall situation. But the Earth Simulator is the first system able to encompass enough information to see the entire picture.
As the rest of the world works to equal Japan's achievement -- the U.S. Department of Energy has contracted for systems two and three times faster, for example -- humanity should finally be able to know the long-range consequences of its actions beforehand.