Can a $1.5bn supercomputer save humanity?

reply to post by belial259


Very true. This kind of tech could be dangerous in the wrong hands, but the same could be said about a car or a bulldozer. Just because a technology has the potential for destruction, does not necessarily mean that it will be used in such a way.

The article doesn't say whether this is a CERN project, just that it's being developed in the same region, although I would feel better about it if it were CERN, rather than DARPA or some other US military project.

You know, the article states very little on the capabilities of this supercomputer, but with the ability to track down, store and analise EVERY peice of data in real time, I'm wondering whether this is going to be a quantum processor. I just can't see current silicon processors being able to handle that much info, regardless of how much parallel processing you implement.

Originally posted by nik1halo
The article doesn't say whether this is a CERN project, just that it's being developed in the same region, although I would feel better about it if it were CERN, rather than DARPA or some other US military project.

I've been trying to find a project website to see a prospectus or something. But I haven't had any luck so far.

What I did find though was a hit on the guy making the thing.

Dirk Helbing is currently Professor of Sociology, in particular of Modeling and Simulation, at ETH Zurich since 2007 and External Professor of the Santa Fe Institute since 2009.

Professor Dirk Helbing

In my opinion the problem with this proposal is that the Living Earth Simulator would need access to a ridiculous amount of information in order to make truly accurate predictions which either may not be available or could possibly be made available only at the cost of turning the world in to a Big Brother Nation.

Another problem - there's no expecting the unexpected is there?

Sounds more like a $1.5 billion gamble to me than something that could save the world. If humanity wants salvation they're going to have to earn it without looking for potential quick-fix solutions.

reply to post by muzzleflash


Hey Muzzel?

Sim Earth.....an.....OLD GAME

My very first game was Ultima on a commodore 64 console. Now that's old buddy.

I was 6 years old tho lol.

reply to post by Izarith


That's what I said to him earlier.

My first game was Roland on the Ropes on the Amstrad CPC-464 in 1986! It had a 4MHz CPU, 64kB of RAM and ran BASIC 1.0 as an o/s and you had to wait 5-10 minutes for the games to load from tape!

Ah, the good old days!

For you kids, this is what I'm talking about.

Amstrad CPC-464

Explanation: 1.5 Billion Euros and for what???

An answer that is akin to 42!

Personal Disclosure: Let me forecast that the Computer to find out what the original answer actually means will be far in excess of 1.5 billion Euros!

Ive said it here before and Ill say it again.

This is nothing new, they have been doing this since the first supercomputers. This is just the latest version.

The above statement has been confirmed to me by two people who work for naval intelligence.

Computer modeling has been running the economy since the early 80s. I am firmly of the belief that this is one of the main reasons why society is so messed up.

No one wants to live anymore. Anyone that wants to be enslaved by a machine be my guest, I'd rather live.

Originally posted by nik1halo
reply to post by belial259

 

Very true. This kind of tech could be dangerous in the wrong hands, but the same could be said about a car or a bulldozer.

No, no one on this planet can understand anothers thoughts, fact. Thoughts are your own, and any word can mean a million different things.

reply to post by ventian


That is the first thing that came to mind for me when I read the article. Who knows though it might do good for humanity. If it dosent invade our privacy though.

reply to post by boondock-saint


Your right thats the scary part........

No. Because it's made by humans.

Originally posted by andy1033

Originally posted by nik1halo
reply to post by belial259

 

Very true. This kind of tech could be dangerous in the wrong hands, but the same could be said about a car or a bulldozer.

No, no one on this planet can understand anothers thoughts, fact. Thoughts are your own, and any word can mean a million different things.

What are you on about?

No-one is talking about reading people's thoughts. We're talking about statistical probability analysis on a planetary scale. There's nothing magical about it, just mathematical. It's a computer for christ's sake!

It needs far more artificial intelligence, and a world-wide interface to humanoid-robot control. As I understand it's current proposed capability... it's only a large real-time database for 'human only' usage. If humans are still involved in implementing the computer's logic decisions... then it will fail to "save humanity".

[edit on 5/5/2010 by Larryman]

Oh the huge target this thing is going to have painted on it side, only this time it wont be just the LHC-paranoids but also every greasey-faced hacker in every basement across the world. Can you imagine the wealth of information at your finger tips if you compromised the system? And if the monkeys from CERN are behind this then I have no doubt that eventually someone will compromise the system's security, they can't even keep the LHC running and safe for goodness sake.

This thing is only going to be able to work with known public data so I don't think its going to be as all-knowing as people would like to think. It won't have access to the plans of terrorist groups, rogue nation-states or any other malcontents who can with a push of a button change the entire world. The only way this thing would even begin to have the ability to predict world events would be for it to get tied into the Echelon system and be able to do the processing real-time; that would put it very close to being able to determine real-time thought patterns and the ability to extrapolate useful information from the data collected.

reply to post by Helig


LOL... I think you just made my point about 'humans being involved'.

If they could just harness the power of the 30,000,000 PS3 systems, world-wide, and tap into their cell processors to utilize it as one big super computer, I think we could have something far more powerful than this $1.5bn computer.

Each PS3 has 7 spe + 1 PPE = 8 cores. Out of the 7 available processors, 1 goes to the OS typically and games utilize 5 cores with the 6th being available if the OS calls upon it. So saying that each PS3 has at least 6 available cores that would mean that there are 180,000,000 processors available.

Folding@home broke the Petaflop barrier on September 16, 2007, with 670,000 registered PS3s. If you divide the 30,000,000 by the 670,000 you get about 45 Petaflops.

In February 2009, IBM also announced work on "Sequoia," which appears to be a 20 petaflops supercomputer. This will be equivalent to 2 million laptops (whereas Roadrunner is comparable to a mere 100,000 laptops). It is slated for deployment in late 2011.

Roadrunner was built out of 13,000 PlayStation 3 Cell processors and 7,000 AMD Opteron processors and is housed by the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The RoadRunner is allegedly capable of executing 1,000 trillion computations per second, or a petaflop,

So, if Sony were to harness the power of all the PS3s in the wild, at once, it could possibly have a 45 Petaflop supercomputer, based on folding@home and a similar application to noninvasively harness the power. If they could actively have full access to all 30,000,000 PS3 systems out there it would seem they could have around 1,000 Petaflops (1 exaflop), give or take, with specialized software.

These are all very rough estimations.

We just need to wait for nanotech augments for the body. Then JC will be created, fuse with this supercomputer, destroy the NWO and the illuminati, and save humanity.

Originally posted by omarsharif

Can a $1.5bn supercomputer save humanity?

Just be wary if such a thing becomes self aware...

Then again we could all be part of a supermassive computer simulation we think is reality and have just started to create simulations that approximate what we believe is real, and then that simulation starts running simulations, and so forth ad infinitum....

Originally posted by DJM8507
If they could just harness the power of the 30,000,000 PS3 systems, world-wide, and tap into their cell processors to utilize it as one big super computer, I think we could have something far more powerful than this $1.5bn computer.

Funny you should say that, I'm sure someone did something like that at around the time the PS3 was released, although I can't find a reference to it at the moment though. If memory serves, they needed a supercomputer for a specific job and found that the best processor for the job was the one that the PS3 was using, so they got a load of them and ran them in parallel.

Ha! I wrote the above before reading the rest of your post... silly me

[edit on 5-5-2010 by nik1halo]