I was about to click out of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory's website when I stumbled across this news release: "Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s institutional “Grand Challenge” scientific computing program has allocated 83.7 million CPU hours to 17 research projects ranging from astrophysics, chemistry, materials and biosciences to earthquake and climate simulation on Laboratory supercomputers."
... "Research projects were selected by the Laboratory’s Deputy Director for Science and Technology, the Laboratory Strategic Program Board and the Laboratory Science and Technology Office. To be considered, proposals had to “address a grand-challenge-scale, mission-related problem that promises unprecedented discoveries in a particular scientific and/or engineering field of research, and if successful, will result in high-level recognition by the scientific community at large.”
... "For example, a multi-institutional group of climate scientists will conduct the most detailed multi-decade global climate simulations ever performed as part of the larger effort to understand how climate changes over time. “By performing these climate simulations of unprecedented detail and fidelity and making them available to the climate research community, we have the potential to dramatically advance our understanding of climate and how it may be affected by anthropogenic factors,”
Grand Challenge recipients have been allocated time on Atlas, the new 44 teraFLOP (trillion floating operations per second) machine and Thunder, a 22 teraFLOP machine -- systems dedicated to unclassified research through the Laboratory’s Multi-programmatic and Institutional Computing program. Central processing unit or CPU time is measured across the multiple CPUs in a computer. For example, two CPU hours can be one CPU used for two hours or two CPUs used for one hour. High performance computers generally consist of thousands of CPUs; the Atlas system contains 9, 216 CPUs."
You know, it's stories like this that make me optimistic about the future. "Over the last 10 years, high performance computing resources dedicated to unclassified institutional research have increased more than a thousand fold from 72 giga (72,000 million) FLOPS in 1997 to 81 teraFLOPS today."
This is what the Singularity protagonists are pointing to. Prosaic sad sacks like me are stubbornly waiting to see the results of the research performed. Something inside me grumbles that a well-designed program wouldn't need 82 million hours to execute... (this from someone who's never written a line of code in his life).
On the other hand, there are specific sectors where this exercise in and of itself might result in the doubling of human knowledge.
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