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By Michael Stroh
Sun Staff
Originally published November 19, 2002
IBM Corp. has won a government contract to build two supercomputers whose speed, company officials say, could for the first time approach the theoretical raw processing power of the human brain.
The $290 million contract between IBM and the Department of Energy was expected to be made public today at Supercomputing 2002, the annual high-performance computing conference being held this week in downtown Baltimore.
Fast and even faster
The first machine, dubbed ASCI Purple, will be capable of performing 100 trillion calculations per second when it's delivered in 2004, the company said. That would make it nearly three times faster than the world's reigning supercomputer champion, Earth Simulator, built for the Japanese government by the NEC Corp.
The second machine, code-named Blue Gene/L and scheduled for delivery a year after ASCI Purple, is expected to be even quicker - churning through a maximum 360 trillion calculations per second.
"It's an enormous leap forward," said Jack Dongarra, a University of Tennessee computer scientist who tracks the world's 500 most powerful computers.
The machines, he said, would be "an engineering tour de force."
The computers will be used mainly by scientists at the three national laboratories to assess the safety and reliability of the country's nuclear weapons stockpile.
Once government researchers assessed the bombs simply by blowing them up. But since 1990 a testing ban has forced them to model explosions mathematically inside a computer instead.
Government researchers say they plan to put the computers to a wide variety of other scientific uses - from modeling the complex behavior of stars to trying to predict earthquakes better by studying underground fault lines.
The national laboratories - Los Alamos, Sandia and Lawrence Livermore - already own four of the five fastest computers in the world, but the two new machines are nonetheless expected to have a major impact on research.
"It's like having an electron microscope when all the other scientists have a magnifying glass," said Mark Seager, who oversees high-performance computing at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
Straight off the shelf
The new IBM computers are examples of how the field of supercomputing has evolved.
Once the custom-built equivalent of Formula One race cars, many of the world's fastest supercomputers are now constructed by wiring together the same electronic components found in any corner computer store.
The only difference is that supercomputers use a lot more of them.
The brains of ASCI Purple, for example, will be created from 12,544 standard IBM microprocessors. The chips are close cousins of the kind used in many Apple computers and Nintendo game machines, company officials said.
Supercomputers have also grown more common over the years. Once confined to nuclear research and weather forecasting, the machines are now used to design aircraft, autos and drugs. They hunt for signs of extraterrestrial life and for quirks in human DNA. Banks employ them to detect credit card fraud while popular Internet search engine Google uses a simplified supercomputer to comb cyberspace.
"It touches every area of science," says Dongarra.
Brain-like power
Some scientists contend that ASCI Purple could achieve another computing milestone - the first machine to exhibit the same raw computational power as the human brain.
Hans Moravic, a researcher in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, has estimated the brain can perform 100 trillion calculations per second.
A robot with a computer like ASCI Purple as its brain could, if it had the right software, essentially mimic human behavior, he said.
Supercomputers, of course, have already shown that they surpass human intelligence in some areas. In 1997 IBM's Deep Blue trounced chess champion Garry Kasparov in a highly publicized match.
But quantifying the brain's calculating ability in computer terms is not easy, and comparisons between man and machine are hotly debated.
"We're not expecting ASCI Purple to pick up a brush and paint the Sistine Chapel any time soon," said Dave Turek, vice president of deep computing at IBM.
Sincerely,
District Overbeer
Edited by - Valis on 20 November 2002 17:3:44
