

Sequoia: 20 Petaflops, 1.6 million cores, 1.6 Petabytes RAM - timf
http://hpcinfo.wordpress.com/2009/02/05/sequoia-20-petaflops-16-million-cores-16-petabytes-ram-6-megawatts/

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biohacker42
It's interesting to think about the possible uses for a machine like that.

My own personal interest is protein folding.

Proteins are folding right now, as you read this, in every cell of your body,
and they're doing it in linear time.

But computationally we're stuck with exponential time.

The day we find an algorithm for linear time protein folding, is the day the
world changes at least as much as when penicillin was discovered.

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anamax
> My own personal interest is protein folding.

> But computationally we're stuck with exponential time.

It's not that bad and it "recently" got a lot better.

Search for "shaw protein folding neutral territory".

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bbgm
It's not even close. Shaw's work is good, but we are still not close to
folding proteins from a linear sequence. The physics is just not there

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lst
...and is it finally coming close to .00001 % of a human brain?

If someone is excited about that, what about the human brain itself? Just a
simple information:

The human brain is the most complex thing in the whole universe, or: all of
physical universe is less complex than a single human brain.

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kurtosis
So the human brain has about 10^11 neurons and about 10^4 synapses per neuron.
Naively representing the state of each synapse with one byte requires 10^15
bytes that's about 500,000 PCs.

But neurons aren't necessarily the optimal substrate for "neural" computation.
They have a cycle time of about 100 Hz. Electronics are potentially a factor
of 10^8 faster. Neurons also have a lot of noise which surely reduces their
information transmission capacity. Also there are major constraints on the
neural tissue involving power consumption and stability against siezures. Also
there are vast sections of the brain e.g. the cerebellum which are apparently
devoted to problems like stabilizing posture and making smooth movements which
can be solved much easier with electronic controls.

It's very plausible that we could achieve a factor of 100 or even 1000 over
the brain. The bottleneck is human imagination; we don't have a clue how the
thing works.

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lst
Let me explicitly repeat your statement:

You say that the human brain would (in theory) be able to create something
more intelligent than itself?

(Are you aware of the irony?)

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nebula
While it might be an irony, there is no reason why it is not possible.

If you follow evolution, that's how we came into being in the first place.
Though there was no specific entity working with that explicit goal in the
case of evolution.

