Moore's Law

We talked about Moore's Law the other day. This, of course, is the law that states that the number of transistors in a circuit will double every 2 years. In addition to being an observation of trends, it was stated that this has become a sort of "self-fulfilling prophecy". This is a very important factor in our technological world, but it also makes me wonder. How close are we to having computers do most of our work for us? I believe that, with minimal human input, computers will be able to do so much in the future that a lot of jobs, industries, and even just facets of everyday life will become obsolete. We will have computers readily available that can do complex calculus and physics formulas just by observation.
I am ambivalent toward the concept. On one hand, it would make things easier for everyone. Not to mention that all the programming in computers is put there by humans. So we wouldn't necessarily have an age of technological rule over humans or some hyped-up thing like that. However, those with skills would be completely unappreciated. This, combined with the number of human jobs taken by computers would make it difficult for people to find work. It's an interesting concept. I'm intrigued to find out how it will turn out in the near - and far - future.

Cray Supercomputers

I was sitting in class today and Professor Drake was talking about supercomputers. I have dealt with many different computers in my life but have never learned much about supercomputers. It was astonishing to find out how much these computers can handle so I decided to look into the company who has bragging rights over the fastest computer in the world, Cray Inc..

Cray was founded in 1987 under the name of the Tera Computer Company. They then changed their name when they acquired the Cray Research of Silicon Graphics in 2000. Cray is the company that created the fastest computer in the world, the Cray XT5, or also known as "Jaguar." Jaguar is the first computer to exceed a petaflops in performance. Flops stand for floating point operations per second. The Jaguar system can theoretically perform at 2.3 petaflops per second with almost a quarter of a million core processors. Jaguar can be found at the National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Cray has made a name for themselves as being on the brink of technology, but how much does one of these systems cost? The starting price on a Cray XT6m supercomputer is about $500,000. These computers are for workloads that require only 500-5,000 cores of processing power. However, the Jaguar system is worth millions.

It is amazing how advanced computers have become. Before I heard of supercomputers I did not even know of the term peta-. It is only a matter of time that tera- and peta- will become household terms like mega- and giga-. Plus, I thought the quad-core processing technology was impressive until I heard of the 250,000 processors it takes to run Jaguar. That is just simply outrageous.