Nine months ago, I wrote a post called “The Supercomputer Race” about China’s then top-ranked supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A and what it meant for the U.S. The Tianhe-1A achieved 2.57 petafolps (1015 floating point operations per second) on LINPACK, a benchmark based on a series of complex linear equations. In comparison, […]
The last few years finally saw the arrival of supercomputers capable of petascale performance. In all, seven systems from the US, China, Japan and France achieved the milestone of processing a million billion floating point operations per second (flops) by the end of 2010. But even before this target was […]
I consider myself a techno-optimist, but Watson’s performance in Jeopardy’s IBM Challenge has definitely exceeded my expectations. While I did predict Watson would win the competition, I didn’t think it would be so dominant. This was a contest I thought machine intelligence might win by a narrow margin, but the […]
Recent reports that China is barreling ahead in its development of supercomputers should give the U.S. considerable cause for concern. China has devoted significant resources to their supercomputer program in recent years, resulting in their ranking earlier this year at the number two spot on the TOP500 list. TOP500.org ranks […]