By JOHN MARKOFF
Published: June 9, 2008

SAN FRANCISCO — An American military supercomputer, assembled from components originally designed for video game machines, has reached a long-sought-after computing milestone by processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second.

The new machine is more than twice as fast as the previous fastest supercomputer, the I.B.M. BlueGene/L, which is based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

[THE MOST IMPORTANT PARAGRAPH IN THIS ARTICLE COMES AT THE VERY END:]

By breaking the petaflop barrier sooner than had been generally expected, the United States’ supercomputer industry has been able to sustain a pace of continuous performance increases, improving a thousandfold in processing power in 11 years. The next thousandfold goal is the exaflop, which is a quintillion calculations per second, followed by the zettaflop, the yottaflop and the xeraflop.

””’”IMPROVED A THOUSANDFOLD IN 11 YEARS”””

THAT IS AN EXPONENTIAL TREND!

…To put the performance of the machine in perspective, Thomas P. D’Agostino, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said that if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day….

WHAT IF THEY HAD TO DO ALL THOSE CALCULATIONS BY HAND? SLOOOOOOOOOOOOW! THESE SUPERCOMPUTERS ARE AN EXAMPLE OF THE EXPONENTIAL MAD RUSH TOWARD THE SINGULARITY.

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The Large Hadron Collider, the giant particle accelerator that’s scheduled to begin colliding protons in August, has the potential to produce the long-sought Higgs boson. That elusive particle is a missing link in the commonly accepted model of physics. Observing it would be an important milestone in our understanding of the fundamental forces of the universe. more>>>

Sixty years ago, digital computers made information readable. Twenty years ago, the Internet made it reachable. Ten years ago, the first search engine crawlers made it a single database. Now Google and like-minded companies are sifting through the most measured age in history, treating this massive corpus as a laboratory of the human condition. They are the children of the Petabyte Age. more>>>

Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world. In our endeavor to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears its ticking, but he has no way of opening the case. If he is ingenious he may form some picture of a mechanism which could be responsible for all the things he observes, but he may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations. He will never be able to compare his picture with the real mechanism and he cannot even imagine the possibility or the meaning of such a comparison.

Albert Einstein The Evolution of Physics, 1938

It is easy to develop a sense of creeping paranoia when you begin to contemplate just how many companies, government departments and other organisations know your personal data.

“The average economically active individual in the developed world is on about 700 databases,” said Niamh Gallagher, a researcher at think tank Demos who has spent six months researching the spread of personal data.

She said it would be naive to think that an encounter with one organisation means one isolated database is queried. Typically data is gathered from many sources before a decision is reached.

For instance the USVISIT border system, which is consulted when Britons cross from the UK to the US, mines about 30 separate databases as it checks identities. more>>>

CCTV cameras which use artificial intelligence software are being developed to “hear” sounds like windows smashing, researchers have revealed.

University of Portsmouth scientists are working on adapting the software so it can also react to crowd noise.

Crimes would be captured on camera faster and response times improved.

The news comes after the BBC learned councils in southern England routinely used powers brought in to fight terrorism and crime to spy on people.

Figures obtained by BBC South showed the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa) was used more than 750 times by the councils in 2007/08. more>>>

ScienceDaily (June 24, 2008) — Researchers in Texas are reporting the design, construction, and assembly of nano-size building blocks into the first giant structures that can sense and respond to changes in environmental conditions.

The study, scheduled for the July 9 issue of ACS’s Nano Letters, a monthly journal, terms those structures “giant” because they are about the size of a grain of rice — millions of times larger than anything in the submicroscopic realm of the nanoworld.

In the new study, Pulickel M. Ajayan and colleagues point out that such structures are a step toward the development of futuristic nanomachines with practical applications in delivering medicines to patients, labs-on-a-chip, and other products. Until now, scientists have had difficulty in using nanomaterials to build more complex, multifunctional objects needed for those applications. more>>>

He’s less scary than a Dalek, trendier than a transformer, and now Victoria University’s security robot is putting a more compassionate face on his technological kind.

The robot, known affectionately as Marvin, spends most of his time in pieces while master’s degree students base their study on adapting and improving his working components.

However, when put back together Marvin has the capability of showing a repertoire of human emotions including fear, surprise, happiness, sadness and anger.

Victoria University computer systems engineering professor Dale Carnegie said the range of emotions allowed a modifier to be used to give robots preferences to deal with a variety of situations. more>>>

Are we already beyond the knee? Could it be that close?

Just downloaded and watched the entire first season. Great show…perfect. Moore’s Law, The Singularity, and Judgement Day. I love it.

Contrary to the premise of the show, I say, ‘build the machines’. I also believe that if we do, we shouldn’t cry if it ends up bad for us. Cheers!

Bacteria have been programmed to behave like computers, assembling themselves into complex shapes based on instructions stuffed into their genes.

The study is detailed in April 28 issue of the journal Nature.

In a paper March 8 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, another team led by Weiss showed they could insert DNA into cells to make them behave like digital circuits. The cells could be made to perform basic mathematical logic. The latest work expands this concept to vast numbers of bacteria responding in concert. more>>>

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Bacteria as tiny computers
Since 2000, multiple studies have focused on the largely untapped potential for bacteria, yeast and mammalian cells to be harnessed as tiny and abundant computers. “Ours is unique in that the operation required to solve the problem takes place in a living cell,” Haynes said.

The unique in vivo system takes advantage of the remarkable storage capacity of DNA and the efficiency of molecular self-assembly, Haynes said. DNA replication and bacterial cell division can quickly create millions or even billions of parallel processors. “The more little computers you have working on the problem,” she said, “the greater the likelihood that one is going to pick the right path that will take you to the right solution.”…more>>>

This video shows that the pace of change is being noticed by normal, everyday, non-singulatarian individuals.

It says that it is not just us Singulatarians and Transhumanists with our facts and figures explaining the acceleration of technology and how we interact with it, but that anyone plugged into the system can just…feel it.

They feel it. They talk about it. And they express their concerns to each other. We are all trying to figure out how to cope with the complexity forced upon our lives.

Cheers to the lady in this video for expressing her thoughts and feelings on the subject.