Azi am participat la o întâlnire la Ministerul Comunicațiilor și Societății Informaționale legată de promovarea unui proiect de supercomputing. Este vorba de Blue Gene care a primit medalia națională pentru tehnologie și inovare în septembrie 2009, oferită de președintele SUA. A fost interesant și sper să iasă ceva util pentru universități. Așa cum au subliniat mulți colegi din țară, în România există creiere, dar nu este suficientă finanțarea pentru astfel de proiecte. Nu se mai poate face cercetare, mai ales în domenii de vârf ca biotehnologiile, energetică, medicină, fără tehnică care să permită simulări ale unor procese reale. Dacă ne gândim doar la ceea ce înseamnă acest lucru pentru studiul și tratamentul unor boli, ne dăm seama cât de legat este totul de tehnică. Mulți nu realizează ce putere de calcul este necesară pentru simularea software a unor procese atât de complexe.

Am ajuns la întâlnire doar cu câteva minute înainte pentru că în fața Ministerului Economiei era o grevă a oierilor. Ceva legat de subvenţii… Din păcate bucureștenii au început să se obișnuiască cu astfel de manifestări.

M-am uitat și cum arată Bucureștiul în campanie. Se vede unde sunt banii pentru că cele mai multe bannere și afișaje electronice sunt ocupate de candidatul din partea PD-L. Iar pe toți stâlpii din jurul Palatului Parlamentului sunt însemnele aceluiași candidat. Este sfidător !

In May of 1997 an IBM team completed the building of a supercomputer that could play and beat a world chess champion. The story of Deep Blue demonstrates what is possible in artificial intelligence. Deep Blue needed 30 parallel processors combined with 480 special purpose VLSI chess chips allowing it to analyze 200 million chess positions per second. The end result was a close fought victory over Garry Kasparov, the reigning world chess champion. The power required and form factor made Deep Blue intelligent but certainly not human. Deep Blue knew chess, nothing else. Deep Blue was immobile. To accomplish its chess-winning feat Deep Blue required more power than thousands of human brains.

Successors to Deep Blue have added more processors and decreased power requirements. Blue Gene, a more recent product of IBM research improves performance by a factor of 100 over Deep Blue. In March 2005, Blue Gene had reached peak performance of more than 100 teraflops, capable of doing simulations that used to take hours in nanoseconds. But Blue Gene, for all its computational skill, occupied up to 20 refrigerator-sized racks and continued to consume massive amounts of power, although considerably less than Deep Blue.

“The challenge of computer design in the 21st century will be energy efficiency,” says Eric Kronstadt, IBM Research’s director of exploratory server systems. “Blue Gene’s highly efficient design enables it to pack more compute power per cubic centimeter, by far, than any other computer in its class.” Blue Gene as a successor to Deep Blue demonstrates this, a trend to smaller, more powerful, less energy consuming computing technology. We appear however to be reaching the limits of what current silicon-based technology can provide in terms of computational capability and power consumption. We need, therefore, to vastly reduce both form factor and power consumption if we are going to approach the goal of designing artificial intelligence with human characteristics.

One of our distinct human advantages over artificial intelligence in terms of processing capability is our ability to do it with minimal power requirements. Our human brain runs on no more than 20 watts of power equal to the refrigerator bulb you turned on when you went to get an apple from the crisper to provide your brain with fuel. When you compare that with the computer I am using to write this blog, the factor of size and power consumption are minuscule. If we were to build a computer with the brain power equivalent to your brain or mine today we would require a power source equal in size to a small hydroelectric facility.

So our current technology of transistors and computer chips remain crippled by power consumption constraints. That’s why Dr. Kwabena Boahen, at Stanford University, is doing research on shrinking the power requirements for computing technology. Dr. Boahen states, ” Energy efficiency isn’t just a matter of elegance. It fundamentally limits what we can do with computers.”

In our next posting we will look at quantum computers, neuromorphic chip technologies and bio circuits. These are the cutting edge technologies that are driving the next stage in the computer revolution.

Not too long ago I discussed how Henry Markram is building a brain in an IBM supercomputer over at EPFL while suggesting patterns of strange attraction that might exist within the mind (see Self Similarity ~ Fractals, Fractals Everywhere…). Looks like we might be able to know in the next 10 years or so whether my intuition is actually fact, or just simply fiction… Also, we might be provided with the definiion of Life, as a sentient being is born within the mainframe of the computer… Perhaps this might preclude the advent of A.I. and justify the complex issues in stories such as Masamune Shirow’s “Ghost In The Shell” and the film “A.I.”?

Henry Markram says the mysteries of the mind can be solved — soon. Mental illness, memory, perception: they’re made of neurons and electric signals, and he plans to find them with a supercomputer that models all the brain’s 100,000,000,000,000 synapses.

Henry Markram Builds A Brain In A Supercomputer

About Henry Markram:

Henry Markram, Project Director of the Blue Brain Project, Director of the Center for Neuroscience & Technology and co-Director of EPFL’s Brain Mind Institute, obtained his B.Sc. (Hons) from Cape Town University, South Africa under the supervision of Rodney Douglas and his Ph.D from the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, under the supervision of Menahem Segal. During his PhD he discovered a link between acetylcholine and memory mechanisms by showing that acetylcholine modulates the primary receptor linked to synaptic plasticity.

He went to the USA as a Fulbright Scholar at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), where he studied ion channels on synaptic vesicles. He then went as a Minerva Fellow to the Laboratory of Bert Sakmann at the Max Planck Institute, Heidelberg, Germany, where he discovered calcium transients in dendrites evoked by sub-threshold activity, and by single action potentials propagating back into dendrites. He also began studying the connectivity between neurons, describing in great detail how layer 5 pyramidal neurons are interconnected.

He was the first to alter the precise millisecond relative timing of single pre- and post-synaptic action potentials to reveal a highly precise learning mechanism operating between neurons — now reproduced in many brain regions and known as spike timing-dependent synaptic plasticity (STDP). These experiments were carried out in 1993, four years before publication. Although there were some correlation-sensitive findings before, this was the first study that manipulated single pre- and post-synaptic spike times to monitor the effect of synaptic changes.

He was appointed assistant professor at the Weizmann Institute for Science, Israel, where he started systematically dissecting out the neocortical column. He discovered that synaptic learning can also involve a change in synaptic dynamics (called redistribution of synaptic efficacy) rather than merely changing the strengths of connections. He also revealed a spectrum of new principles governing neocortical microcircuit structure, function, and emergent dynamics. Based on the emergent dynamics of the neocortical microcircuit he and Wolfgang Maass developed the theory of liquid computing, or high entropy computing.

In 2002 he moved to EPFL as full professor and founder/director of the Brain Mind Institute and Director of the Center for Neuroscience and Technology. At the BMI, in the Laboratory for Neural Microcircuitry, Markram has continued to unravel the blueprint of the neocortical column, building state-of-the-art tools to carry out multi-neuron patch clamp recordings combined with laser and electrical stimulation as well as multi-site electrical recording ,chemical imaging and gene expression. Markram has received numerous awards and published over 75 papers.

For more information about Henry Markram and his amazing work, please click here.

IBM  ed il governo Bulgaro hanno annunciato un progetto di collaborazione nell’area delle  nanoscienze, che prevede  la creazione del primo Centro di Nanotecnologia del Paese. L’accordo intende anche promuovere nuove sinergie tra l’industria, le università e la Bulgarian Academy of Science. Sulla base di un contratto commerciale separato,  un team di consulenti IBM assisteranno il governo bulgaro nella realizzazione di una nuovo centro di ricerca  che sarà dotato di equipaggiamenti all’avanguardia per  esplorare e sviluppare innovazioni e nuove scoperte nell’ambito delle nanoscienze. Il nuovo laboratorio utilizzerà il sistema Blue Gene di IBM, il supercomputer più potente in Bulgaria di proprietà dell’Agenzia di Stato Bulgara per la Tecnologia dell’Informazione e le Comunicazioni.  Il Centro di Nanotecnologia bulgaro, il cui completamento è previsto per l’anno prossimo e i laboratori copriranno una superficie totale di 500 metri quadrati.  Le aree di ricerca saranno: – microfluidica e nanofluidica,  per  approfondire la conoscenza di cellule, tessuti e altre entità biologiche a supporto dei test di tossicità dei farmaci e dello sviluppo di nuove medicine; – nanosistemi in ambito elettronico e sensoriale,  per supportare lo sviluppo di sistemi di diagnostica, di monitoraggio ambientale (quali ‘analisi dell’inquinamento atmosferico) e di sicurezza;- nanomateriali,  substrati virtuali avanzati per semiconduttori composti che potrebbero gettare le basi per la realizzazione di circuiti elettrici in nanoscala.  La nanotecnologia è una branca delle scienze applicate, specializzata nella progettazione e controllo della struttura degli oggetti di dimensioni piccolissime, in maniera affidabile e ripetibile. Le scale di lunghezza variano da quelle atomiche a quelle microscopiche, in genere da 1 a 100 nanometri. Un nanometro equivale ad un miliardesimo di metro -  circa 100.000 volte più fine di un capello umano. Si prevede che la nanotecnologia permetterà di fare importanti scoperte in molti campi tra cui quello dei materiali funzionali avanzati, la nanoelettronica, la tecnologia dell’informazione e della comunicazione , i sistemi sensoriali, la strumentazione, la sanità e le scienze della vita e l’energia. Le applicazioni nanotecnologiche nel settore energetico, ad esempio, che garantiscono un utilizzo più efficace dell’energia solare e forniscono nuovi modi di purificare o desalinizzare l’acqua, potrebbe persino contribuire a risolvere alcune tra le più grandi sfide del nostro tempo.

Fans of the TV game show Jeopardy! know that it’s now possible to audition for the show over the Internet. Sure, if you pass the test you still have to do an in-person interview before you can go on the show, but the online tests have made it easier for more people to try out.

Well, now the computers themselves are giving it a try. John Markoff wrote a piece the other day in The New York Times in which he explained how IBM is preparing a computer to take on real people on Jeopardy!. It’s not unlike Deep Blue taking on Garry Kasparov in chess. Except that Jeopardy! is a completely different sort of game, one that requires you to recall hundreds, if not thousands, of facts at the drop of a hat. Markoff points out that the computer will have to make language comparisons and interpretations, and that’s true; the answers are often written in ways that may mislead you into providing a different question than the correct one. Plus I doubt computers get puns. It’s a matter of artificial intelligence, and computers have some ways to go before they get there. So while some answers will be easy to find the correct question to, others that might be easy for a human to figure out may completely confuse the machine.

On the other hand, I’m not so sure the computer will be completely at a disadvantage. As Jeopardy! champion Bob Harris will tell you, it can be nerve-wracking standing under those lights. A human has to deal with that, and (in Harris’ case) possibly a nasty illness at the same time. Computers don’t get sick, nor do they have nerves to wrack.

So we’ll see if Watson (named for IBM founder Thomas J. Watson Sr.) has a shot at winning a match. Its scientists have been working on it for three years. They’ll move a Blue Gene supercomputer to the show set in Los Angeles and will prevent the machine from looking up answers on the Internet. Rather than reading the text and listening to show host Alex Trebek read the answers, Watson will be fed the answers via digital input.

My question is this: Will they give Watson hands, so it can press a buzzer?

If you’d like to learn more about some related topics, take a look at these links:

How Robots Work
How PCs Work
How did the Internet start?

Il supercomputer ecologico più potente di 100mila pc

Il blue Gene

Prestazioni triplicate, ingombri minimi e basso consumo energetico: è la carta d’identità di Blue Gene/P, la seconda generazione di supercomputer della Ibm, il successore dell’ormai ex computer più veloce al mondo, il Blue Gene/L, presentato lo scorso novembre. Cosa sia capace di fare questa meraviglia tecnologica lo si può intuire da quelle che sono le doti che lo caratterizzano: funzionamento continuo in ambiente reali a velocità superiori a un “petaflop”, e cioè si va oltre un quadrilione di operazioni al secondo, e picchi prestazionali che toccano i tre petaflop (rispetto ai 280 teraflop dell’illustre predecessore).
Numeri da fantascienza, che farebbero impallidire Halo, il “computerone” nato dalla mente geniale di Stanley Kubrik per il suo “Odissea nello Spazio”. Blue Gene/P, infatti, e questi sono esempi comprensibili da anche chi informatico non è, ha una capacità di elaborazione 100mila volte più potente di quella di un normale pc ed è in grado di elaborare più operazioni in un secondo di una pila di notebook alta circa tre chilometri. Completando l’elenco degli attributi tecnici della nuova creatura Ibm va quindi evidenziato come sul chip di Blue Gene/P siano integrati quattro e non più solo due processori PowerPC 450 a bassa frequenza (850 Mhz contro 700MHz) e come ogni chip sia in grado di eseguire 13,6 miliardi di operazioni al secondo: il che significa che una scheda quadrata di silicio da 60 cm che contiene 32 di questi microprocessori arriva a produrre qualcosa come 435 miliardi di operazioni al secondo. E che per arrivare ai tre petaflop di cui sopra Blue Gene/P mette insieme fino a 884,736 processori alloggiati in 216 “armadi” – i cosiddetti rack – alti poco meno di due metri.

Un cuore ecologico e una rivoluzione per la medicina

Uno dei punti di forza di Blue Gene/P, come anticipato, sono i consumi, sette volte inferiori rispetto a quelli di qualsiasi altro supercomputer. Il tutto garantendo capacità di elaborazione di equazioni scientifiche in aree quali la fisica delle particelle e le nanotecnologie a velocità irraggiungibili in precedenza e costi legati al fabbisogno di energia elettrica ridotti a termini perlomeno accettabili. Fra le possibili applicazioni del nuovo supercomputer, destinato a operare sia in campo commerciale che in campo scientifico, molte riguardano il campo medico.

Blue Gene/P, infatti, può dare il supporto necessario a riprodurre un intero organo di un individuo per determinare le sue interazioni con un farmaco, gestendo (senza far ricorso a tutta la potenza disponibile) la simulazione di esperimenti clinici su 27 milioni di pazienti in un solo pomeriggio. Fra i primi utilizzatori del nuovo supercomputer ci sono l’Argonne National Laboratory del Dipartimento dell’Energia degli Stati Uniti, la Stony Brook University, i Brookhaven National Labs (che hanno collaborato con la Ibm al progetto), la Max Planck Society e il Forschungszentrum Julich tedeschi e i Daresbury Laboratorydella Science and Technology Facilities Council del Cheshire, nel Regno Unito.

L’era del “petaflop computing” è quindi iniziata e le grandi manovre nel campo dei supercomputer non si fermano: la Sun Microsystems, nel corso di un evento che si tiene in questi giorni in Germania, presenterà in anteprima Constellation System, un’architettura che potrà raggiungere capacità di picco di 500 teraflop.

Fonte Ecplanet

I think I need to get down and pray. There’s so much that’s going wrong with the world, and I’m told about it constantly. Turn on the news and all it’s all doom and gloom. Terrorists threatening big buildings and hamburgers threatening fat people. There’s no place to sit down and relax, to find somewhere that is calm where we can, ultimately, chill out and relax. I can’t escape my blackberry. The stock market never sleeps. The internet never sleeps, if you slip up for even a couple seconds, competition instantaneously will come up on you and bite you.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s competing for internet viewing time on blogs or finding a job handling computer outsourced jobs, this new world we’re growing into is murdering our humanity slowly but surely. Though it’s nothing new to be dependent on technology, luddites complained about it eons ago, what we have now is something new. It’s a digital world that is relentless. The rate of change in all aspects of society is accelerating past our ability to make any sense of it. We’re being choked by the very tools that we thought would emancipate us. Future Shock actually thought that all this technology would give us much more leisure time, so we’d all become fat from just sitting in front of our computers.

Well, we certainly all are stuck to the internet, but it’s not from a wealth of free time. We being swept away from 21 thousand things that we have to do today and we can’t keep up with it. People are still swindling each other just like time immemorial. We are just as elevated and depraved at the same time as we’ve ever been. But now with information flowing at the speed of pure change, we are constantly looking at ourselves and seeing the change regurgitating itself upon us all at once. It becomes numbing, and people fall back to old ways of finding order in the world or they just give up and find some sense of existential solace in apathy and ignorance to what’s going on around. Either that or we try to create an identity for ourselves out of some pastiche of past trends, hoping that will give us lasting importance to others.

That was, in my mind, a big point behind Watchmen. People became subsumed by trying to create identities for themselves in order to become something of value in the world, to make a living. Then they were replaced by Dr. Manhattan, by a being that could keep up with the increasingly fast rate of change. Everyone was outsourced out of existence by technology that made human beings inefficient. And in the end, the world sustains itself because of terrible tragedy and lies to cover up the well-intentioned (yet still terrible) mistakes of misguided men with power. It doesn’t matter if the end is as ridiculous as Watchmen was, what matters is that, within human reason, such things like that WILL be possible (if not already.)

So we look at the torturous consequences of becoming out of date and what matters anymore? Computer processor speed is increasing so much so that by 2045, the power of computer processing will be billions upon billions faster than the combined processing capability of every human being that has ever existed. And this inexorable surge in processor speed doesn’t seem to be slowing down. IBM has a computer called Blue Gene that has one tenth the processing speed of the human brain (10^16 calculations per second or so). By 2010, IBM will have a computer with the same raw speed of processing as a human brain.

The rate of human life expectancy has also been increasing exponentially since the middle of the 19th century. Mortality is now increasing by up to a year or two every few years now. 100 years ago people had the life expectancy of living to 50 or so. Now we have a life expectancy of around 80. With the tools that are becoming available with nanotech we will be able to create medicines that will eradicate viruses unlike anything we could before. These tools based on the smallest possible machines when combined with carbon computers and increasingly clever ways of modelling reality will ultimately give us the tools to create what is called a universal constructor, basically a replicator.

Simply put, with such technology and computer speed, it will be possible to turn everything into a commodity like music was into an mp3. The tools we have for modeling consciousness are becoming increasingly sophisticated to the point of which we can use the brain to move electronic limbs just by pure thought. They’ve been working on this for amputees for the longest time. And then there is, allegedly, research being made into anti-matter bombs and space engines by the military. We have Predator robot airplanes fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Who’s to say that this technology is not being made for us to create synthetic soldiers to fight radio controlled wars of the future. Thats what the land warrior program’s end goal IS isn’t it?

I’m 26. By 2045 I’ll be 63. Our generation will be the people who create the synthetic intelligences that will organize our reality into something new. We are the generation that is going to do this, and our music is one that is completely synthetic. This new electronic is the complete and utter collision of everything that has ever existed all at once. Niches seem to exist, but people already realize that music is all held together by similar strands, hence we love everything. There IS a universal appeal of music with good melody (and by that I mean music which has a compelling emotional argument and resolution in musically logical sounds).

This leads me to the New Alternative. These new forms of music, under the banner of New Alt, are basically a forwarding looking approach to the rapid rehashing of society around us. The new methods for creating music are totally different from how they’ve ever been. What we see is the creation of the new musicians, people who use tools like Live and Cubase and Logic to put together music more like chefs and painters than like traditional musicians. The thing is though, all these guys are traditional musicians. You have to be in order to write good music. But what they do is use the old forms of music as sort of a skeleton upon to drape all the different new sounds they are hearing in their heads.

It’s somewhat fitting that this new type of music is specifically a dance form of music. This was the first type of music, as far as we are aware, that people created. They used their bodies and random objects to drum stuff. And they probably danced and had sex afterwards. Sheesh, sounds like your last night at the disco doesn’t it? Ok, maybe not, but clubbin’ has been around since the dawn of reality, and it’s gonna be there as long as we stay human. And now we see with this music a philosophy that seems to embrace a ‘fuck reality lets dance around the volcano’ approach. Perhaps, maybe the ultimate end of reality is hopeless, but I don’t think so. I think the start of this new amazing music is only just beginning, as is the journey into electronic music, electronic medicine, and ultimately electronic life.

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All the above might be a bit much for the average individual so… sorry, I guess we didn’t get to choose what world we were born into when we got here. Maybe our lives started after some random encounter at a dance party. You never know how these things go. But regardless, now it’s time to post up a lovely soundtrack of new completely awesome tunes to rock out too while you contemplate that life is meaningless, computers are going to take over, and I’d rather agree with Pascal’s wager than believe a God doesn’t exist and face the opposite consequences.

So, sorry about it all. Actually, I’m not sorry, I really don’t care to be honest. Live your lives and rock out because it’s all a choice. And here, this is the latest from Hostage (courtesy of Discodust). It’s the first Hostage tune that I’ve really dug. It’s called Sorry, it’s got an acid, tripped out ravish feel to it. And a sample which says ‘Sorry’ over and over and over again. It’s distorted and relentless, sorta like the ole Janet Reno dance parties on SNL except way cooler and nothing like Janet Reno or SNL.

Hostage – Sorry

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I’ve been on a real kick with these newer wobbly bass styled tunes that often get cataloged under such misleading names as fidget house, blog house, blog this, blog that. Simpley put, it’s house music with a four to the floor dance beat and a hugenormous uberly cataclysmical bassline of earth-quakeingly good proportions. A group I recently discovered, and I totally heart now, is Jokers of the Scene. Their tunes are HUGE! Here are their remixes of Vitaminsforyou, Walter Lilly & St. Plomb, Dandi Wind, and Muscles. All great. Subs required. Earplugs optional. It goes to 11.

Vitaminsforyou – Flesh Python (Jokers of the Scene Remix)

Muscles – The Lake (Jokers of the Scene Remix)

Walter Lilly & St. Plomb – Shake a Leg (Jokers of the Scene Remix)

Dandi Wind – Searching Flesh (Jokers of the Scene Remix)

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Does It Offend You, Yeah? is so way cool. The blog world knows about them, and like most things in the world they got like 30 seconds of love on myspace. Their an awesome electro-indie group out of the UK that mixes the new alternative type electro sounds with artsy, jangly indie like Bloc Party (Silent Alarm in particular). Their album is one of the highpoints of the year so far with a surprising contrast between violent hardcore banging about forcible sex on the dancefloor (Let’s Make Out) to tender and sincerely heartbroken tunes about lost love (Epic Last Song).

Here is an awesome remix of the tender song put into a banging wobbly bass format. It really sorta suprised me, I totally dig on the Jack Beats, another group like Jokers of the Scene with unstoppably wobbly bass songs, but I would never have suspected them to remix ‘Epic Last Song’ over ‘Let’s Make Out’. Needless to say, I really like the result. It’s got a cool combo of crystal clear basslines, well used placement of vocals, and a drop that includes the bridge of the original song very effectively. Mucho heartage aqui!

Does it Offend You, Yeah? – Epic Last Song (Jack Beats Remix)

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Busta Rhymes has been on a rampage. First the remix by Meterhead that I posted about recently. Then the Chew Fu remix that I tossed on top of Goose and Lies in Disguise in my recent mini-mix, and now the illustrious Bird Peterson taking ‘Don’t Touch Me’, and speeding up Bustas rhymes into a hot dancefloor bootyfest that, if placed right, will totally start riots and make neighbors call the police on your party because they believe the end of the world might be starting in the basement of the house party next door. I can’t wait to play this one out.

Busta Rhymes – Don’t Touch Me (Bird Peterson Remix)

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The whole world seems to be on drugs doesn’t it? The pusher next door. The politician buying his coke from the local gang racketeering the local corner shop where you try to buy your prophylactics and beer. Oh, the loss of innocence. Where does our fall from grace stop Mr. Milton. Anyways. These two next tunes are all about drugs. The first one is by an artist I’m just getting familiar with, Edu K. It’s a huge wobbly pleaser with a tribal middle section where a girl breathily intones, ‘give me the good shit, I want a big hit.’ If this tune were it, I’d totally take a hit. Pure hypnotic throbbing!

Cow Pie – Druggggssszzz (Edu K Remix)

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Adam Tensta is about my age. He obviously ALSO played Nintendo as a youth. How cool is that. Two people from totally different backgrounds, growing up playing Nintendo. One becomes a urban rapper sensation everywhere else other than in the US, and the other goes on to write about him. This tune is about a dopeboy. Now think for a second, does he look like he sells drugs? Is video games now permanently associated with pot-head dudes whacking around Guitar Hero? Is that what Mr. Nintendo intended? An opiate for the masses? Something for us to cover our eyes with while the floor is pulled out from under us by global monopolies in every industry imaginable. Who knows, who the F cares, go find your dopeboy remix right here.

Adam Tensta – Dopeboy (Neon Blak GT Edit)

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I already did a posting where I featured these two chicks on the top cover pic of it. But how could I not resist putting up another pic of them when I had this new Walter Meego Remix of Girls sitting in my inbox. God. Thats one of the great things about the internet, and you see that with alot of the blogs out there. They find the best music, and then they look for the pictures of the hottest chicks that exist on the internet. Lastnightsparty is notorious for putting the pictures of every hip party chicks tits online for the whole world to see. What lovely voyeurism. What class. At least these two above rock out. Shake it like a polaroid picture to Spruce Lee and Kato’s remix. It’s disco-ishy ala Bufi and the Twelves. Kewl.

Walter Meego – Girls (Spruce Lee and Kato Remix)

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Here’s the tune which inspired this whole posting. It’s a new remix by DJ Mehdi of the Aussie pop-star Sam Sparro. It’s an ode about getting overwhelmed by the world. Sorta reminds me of Prince meets new alternative electro house meets edgy unnerving string and synth parts. I might not have all the answers. Einstein’s cosmological constant might actually exist according to recent Chaos Theory theories. I prefer that girl to Einstein. And I’m done writing for now. Ciao bella.

Sam Sparro – 21st Century Digital Life (DJ Mehdi Secret Disco Dub)

Maybe it’s because I’m recovering from the experience of attending a high school reunion, after 30 years of avoiding such an event. But the old parlor game of imagining life and culture during one’s earliest days of life is getting to be somewhat more appealing. For instance, for those of us born around 1960, there’s the eerie phenomenon of switching on the best show currently on TV—I refer of course to “Mad Men” on AMC, now about to begin its second season—and sorting through the inevitable poetic license to discover something about the experience of our parents as they negotiated the pre-JFK, pre-feminism, pre-Beatles, pre-Woodstock, American culture-scape.

In the same vein, tracking one’s relationship to musical culture can take up a similar parlor game, with similarly appealing results. What were the musical currents during the years of our birth, and how might those currents have fared during the intervening decades? We might begin with the most important and lasting American contribution to 20th century music, and I refer of course to jazz. In so doing, it would perhaps be unfair to cite the true giants of modern jazz: Miles Davis, Sarah Vaughan, Thelonius Monk, or the endlesssly astonishing Duke Ellington. The greatness of the cutting-edge jazz musicians of the mid-century is so obvious as to require no argument on their behalf But how about jazz in the heart of its blues-based tradition: the core lounge-fixated pulse of the mainstream of the American improvisatory jazz scene in 1960?

The tenor sax player Gene Ammons (1925-1974), born into a jazz family as the son of boogie-woogie Chicago pianist Albert Ammons, is a fair representative standing in the mainstream of the jazz world as we discover it in mid-1958 on his album Blue Gene, featuring the Gene Ammons All Stars, currently reissued by OJC. This is not the avant garde jazz pinnacle of that era, which only a few months later would be claimed by the great Miles Davis ensemble on the classic Kind of Blue (1959) sessions, where Davis was joined on an un-rehearsed modal set by an immortal line up comprising John Coltrane (tenor), Wynton Kelly (piano), Cannonball Adderly (alto), and Bill Evans (piano). After Kind of Blue, as all students of the music are well aware, jazz would never be the same again.

Instead, on Blue Gene, Ammons presents a merely solid but utterly reliable lineup including Idrees Sulieman (Leonard Graham) on trumpet, Pepper Adams on baritone, Mal Waldron on piano, Art Taylor on drums, Doug Watkins on bass, and Ray Barretto on conga. The rhythm section hardly breaks a sweat, but lays down a fat groove with just a moderate flavor of harmonic improvisation to shade its blues atmosphere into the modern idiom. Titles include only four extended cuts: “Blue Gene”, “Scamperin”, “Blue Greens n Beans”, and “Hip Tip” — and all tracks are long, with plenty of focus on the unhurried solos of Ammons on tenor, which he plays in his characteristic style reminiscent of the vibrato-rich playing of Ben Webster or Scott Hamilton. Long out of print on 33rpm disc, this vital release by Ammons has been given the audiophile vinyl treatment, making the relaxed set of blues numbers a great listening experience, transporting the listener back in time to a favorite smoke-filled lounge of the pre-Kennedy era.

How many of us know that the late Fifties jazz scene was this unpretentiously engaged in the blues, especially in its less experimental moods? Or that the music had so much integrity even on the verge of its transformation by rock and roll, that viscerally commanding but ultimately less enduring musical form that it spawned?

What if we could not blog like we did today or share information between people as we have become accustomed to over the internet? This was a reality (one which I would not know how to live without), but all this was made possible with the creation of :

Kinda makes you think huh?

“This is the first known photograph of the great grandfather of modern digital computers – a room sized, one ton jumble of wiring, valves and racks that was 640 million times less powerful than its descendant, the pocket-sized iPod.”

Imagine an iPod, an iPod is more powerful then whats pictured above. Now lets look at what was announced today by IBM: IBM’s Roadrunner is the worlds Fastest and most efficient computer to date:

The fastest supercomputer in the world is also one of the most energy efficient. That’s according to the Top500 supercomputers list, to be released Wednesday at the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany.

What more could we want; technology improving by leaps and bounds while doing it efficiently. Just take a look at where the fastest computer was last year in comparison to this years:

This year, the 31st time the list has been put together, the honor of top supercomputer goes to IBM’s Roadrunner, which is housed at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory. It’s the first system to reach 1.026 petaflops (1 petaflop is equal to a quadrillion, or one thousand trillion, calculations per second).

For perspective, last year’s most powerful computer, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s BlueGene/L–also made by IBM–reached 208.6 teraflops. This year that computer ranked No. 2, reaching a max processing speed of 478.2 teraflops.

The fun fact of all this is that these computer are baised on the same archtecture as the IBM processors used in the PS3. Imagine that, a supercomputer uses the same processors as your good old gaming system. Thoughts comments?

Related articles

• IBM’s Roadrunner breaks petaflop barrier, tops supercomputer list [via Zemanta]
• IBM’s RoadRunner zooms to No. 1 on Top500 supercomputer list [via Zemanta]

“Blue Brain is a project, begun in May 2005, to create a computer simulation of the entire human brain, down to the molecular level.” <wiki>

The Model
The Simulation
The Future


“In July 2005, EPFL and IBM announced an exciting new research initiative – a project to create a biologically accurate, functional model of the brain using IBM’s Blue Gene supercomputer. Analogous in scope to the Genome Project, the Blue Brain will provide a huge leap in our understanding of brain function and dysfunction and help us explore solutions to intractable problems in mental health and neurological disease.

At the end of 2006, the Blue Brain project had created a model of the basic functional unit of the brain, the neocortical column. At the push of a button, the model could reconstruct biologically accurate neurons based on detailed experimental data, and automatically connect them in a biological manner, a task that involves positioning around 30 million synapses in precise 3D locations.

In November, 2007, the Blue Brain project reached an important milestone and the conclusion of its first Phase, with the announcement of an entirely new data-driven process for creating, validating, and researching the neocortical column.” <about>

• Out of the Blue (SEED)
  Can a thinking, remembering, decision-making, biologically accurate brain be built from a supercomputer?
• Misreading the Mind (LA Times)
  If neuroscientists want to understand the mystery of consciousness, they’ll need new methods.
• A Working Brain Model (MIT Technology Review)
  A computer simulation could eventually allow neuroscience to be carried out in silico.
• Leading the Blue Brain Project (Science)
  Henry Markham Director

Turing, ese genio. Fue una especie de Leonardo da Vinci en su época, pionero en la ciencia del criptoanálisis, en el desarrollo de arquitecturas de computadores y autor de uno de los principios más famosos de la Inteligencia Artificial, un test que lleva su nombre y que permitiría determinar qué software actúa como un verdadero ser humano.

Pues bien, un grupo de investigadores del Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute ha anunciado que este Otoño un software desarrollado por ellos y que correrá sobre un computador Blue Gene podría superar la prueba de Turing. Aquí está el enlace con la noticia en español y aquí el original en inglés.

Soy bastante escéptico ante esta noticia por dos motivos.

Primero, se ha demostrado que el cerebro humano es, respecto a un estándar computacional actual, bastante lento haciendo cálculos. Se estima que un cerebro normal puede realizar del orden de cien millones de operaciones por segundo, lo cual sería equivalente a un PC de 1993. En cuanto a memoria sí salimos mejor parados, pues somos capaces de retener alrededor de cien terabytes de memoria.

La serie Blue Gene tiene algunos de los supercomputadores más avanzados del Mundo, capaces de realizar 500 billones de operaciones por segundo y con una memoria total de 900 terabytes. Teniendo en cuenta, además, que la IA es una ciencia que se centra en procesos y no en los soportes, ¿no parece que la utilización de este monstruo es una maniobra publicitaria?

Segundo, el anuncio no dice si esta nueva creación pensará como un humano. Me explico. Una IA puede comportarse aparentemente como un humano, dando la impresión con sus respuestas a estímulos de que sus procesos mentales son similares a los nuestros. Un avatar imaginario con respuestas preprogramadas a todas las preguntas posibles se comportaría como un humano, pero no pensaría como tal. En el artículo se hace especial énfasis en estados mentales y enormes cantidades de memoria, lo cual, unido a la utilización de un supercomputador Blue Gene, hace que un servidor sospeche del resultado del experimento.

Alan Turing demostró, con su golpe mortal al sistema criptográfico nazi, que la fuerza bruta no es siempre viable. Espero de corazón que el experimento siga el mismo principio.

(Vía menéame)

From KurzweilAI.net:

AI researchers think ‘Rascals’ can pass Turing test

EE Times, Mar. 12, 2008Passing the Turing test–the holy grail of AI (a human conversing with a computer can’t tell it’s not human)–may now be possible in a limited way with the world’s fastest supercomputer (IBM’s Blue Gene) and mimicking the behavior of a human-controlled avatar in a virtual world, according to AI experts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. “We are building a knowledge base that corresponds to all of the relevant background for our synthetic character–where he went to school, what his family is like, and so on,” said Selmer Bringsjord, head of Rensselaer’s Cognitive Science Department and leader of the research project. “We want to engineer, from the start, a full-blown intelligent character and converse with him in an interactive environment like the holodeck from Star Trek.” Read Original Article>>

La última locura de IBM no tiene nada que ver con el ajedrez, sino con el futuro postapocalíptico de Terminator: un servidor capaz de ejecutar toda Internet como una aplicación web.

El nombre en código del proyecto es Kittyhawk, y la base del mismo es la arquitectura Blue Gene/P (ya sabía yo que habría algo de ajedrez). Las primeras estimaciones indican que serían necesarios 67,1 millones de núcleos y alrededor de 32 petabytes de memoria. Y por supuesto, la arquitectura utiliza un núcleo Linux

The University of Alabama at Birmingham has acquired an IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer for biological research, tripling its computing power. The new supercomputer will allow the university to enhance its capabilities in computational biology and molecular simulations.

“Blue Gene will help our researchers make breakthrough simulations of biological processes such as blood flow in arteries and capillaries around tumors,” said Dr. Richard Marchase, vice president for research and economic development at UAB. “A computing facility anchored by Blue Gene will also give the university an advantage in recruiting top faculty and researchers. It also builds a foundation for a world-class computational biology center at the university.”

The new Blue Gene/L system is capable of performing 5.6 trillion calculations every second. It will be used to help study, simulate and find ways to impede or halt biological activity in human tissue that leads to tumors and other life-threatening diseases. This supercomputer proves to be the most promising for extending the length of simulations to the microsecond scale and beyond.

“Blue Gene has proven itself an essential instrument of discovery for scientists around the globe,” said Dave Turek, VP of deep computing for IBM. “Now researchers at UAB will be able to simulate critical processes that occur in microseconds, allowing for slow-motion study of previously invisible systems.”

For more information about the IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer, go to http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/deepcomputing/bluegene.html

University of Alabama at Birmingham strives to be a research university and academic health center that discovers, teaches and applies knowledge for the intellectual, cultural, social and economic benefit of Birmingham, the state and beyond. For more information about the University of Alabama at Birmingham, go to www.uab.edu