21–30 of 37 posts
Is it just me, or is this article written by someone who is clueless? I read the whole thing, and wasn't able to extract a single piece of genuine information. Either someone is gaming HN to make artificial up votes, or I need to find a different forum.
From the end of the article: "But all of the above will not get electronics down to the energy-efficiency of the brain. "That will require many more changes, including a move to analogue computation instead of digital. "It will also involve breakthroughs in new non-Turing models of computation, for example based on an understanding of how the brain processes information." What exactly does all this mean? How would mo…
Computers always do exactly what you tell them, but that correctness is resource intensive. With the "approximate computing" you know you don't need an exact result because maybe you're showing it to a human who doesn't care about the difference between 3.40000 and 3.40001. What if you get that inexact result for half the power? (That's the level of claims I've seen).
That is similar to "analog computation" you might perform in your brain, e.g. recognizing a face is not 100% accurate.
Here's an article about it: http://news.rice.edu/2012/05/17/computing-experts-unveil-sup...
A bunch of more serious resources: http://shakithweblog.blogspot.dk/2012/11/approximate-computi...
"Their vision is that by 2060, a one petaflop computer that would fill half a football field today, will fit on your desktop." Will it be able to run Crysis? But seriously, I'd be even more interested in how these computers will be programmed. Any wild speculations?
Problem is: I feel like we are abstracting software slower than computers are getting faster. Is Javascript really that much more abstract than machine code (assembly)? I think not. In the long run, what we do now are baby steps.
We are still telling computers exactly what to do. Every step needs to be spelled out. And we're doing it by text files...
"Their vision is that by 2060, a one petaflop computer that would fill half a football field today, will fit on your desktop." Will it be able to run Crysis? But seriously, I'd be even more interested in how these computers will be programmed. Any wild speculations?
Abstraction will be the answer. We will need very, very high level domain specific "programming languages". Problem is: I feel like we are abstracting software slower than computers are getting faster. Is Javascript really that much more abstract than machine code (assembly)? I think not. In the long run, what we do now are baby steps. We are still telling computers exactly what to do. Every step needs to be spelled…
The art of liquid cooling has been demonstrated by Aquasar
and put to work inside the German supercomputer SuperMUC
which - *perversely* - harnesses warm water to cool its
circuits.
"Their vision is that by 2060, a one petaflop computer that would fill half a football field today, will fit on your desktop." Will it be able to run Crysis? But seriously, I'd be even more interested in how these computers will be programmed. Any wild speculations?
A few will use Haskell/Erlang/etc. and make better use of the performance.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So is there a particular difficulty in overcoming this noise, or is it more just unexplored territory?
Definitely not unexplored territory, analog computation came first. Notably, the way you program an (electronic) analog computer is by adjusting it's circuitry.. not exactly the friendliest programming model. The problem with noise seems to be repeatability. Enough noise, and reliability becomes a huge problem. With same inputs and analog circuit, you want the same answer every time, don't you? You cannot "overcome t…
That kind of system is a huge simplification, but similar things could be done with analogue computing. In particular, I think probabilistic computing could be done by setting up network feedback loops corresponding to underlying Bayesian networks, where stable points correspond to highest likelihood parameterisations. (I may actually do some work in this direction next year, because it's pretty cool stuff.)
"Their vision is that by 2060, a one petaflop computer that would fill half a football field today, will fit on your desktop." Will it be able to run Crysis? But seriously, I'd be even more interested in how these computers will be programmed. Any wild speculations?
Abstraction will be the answer. We will need very, very high level domain specific "programming languages". Problem is: I feel like we are abstracting software slower than computers are getting faster. Is Javascript really that much more abstract than machine code (assembly)? I think not. In the long run, what we do now are baby steps. We are still telling computers exactly what to do. Every step needs to be spelled…
We don't need to develop extremely high abstractions yet. Not until all the layers below are optimised.
"Their vision is that by 2060, a one petaflop computer that would fill half a football field today, will fit on your desktop." Will it be able to run Crysis? But seriously, I'd be even more interested in how these computers will be programmed. Any wild speculations?
Abstraction will be the answer. We will need very, very high level domain specific "programming languages". Problem is: I feel like we are abstracting software slower than computers are getting faster. Is Javascript really that much more abstract than machine code (assembly)? I think not. In the long run, what we do now are baby steps. We are still telling computers exactly what to do. Every step needs to be spelled…
And with machine learning , we don't even spell every step.
Could you imagine the graphics that are possible with a one petaflop computer? Simulation status right? I'm praying we (humanity) don't nuke ourselves to death during some stupid WWIII type situation before we get there
But I'm not even sure if he considered 4k+ resolutions, 120+ FPS and 3D when he said that, because all of those may play a role too in the future if we want "Matrix-like" graphics in our virtual reality goggles or holodecks. So we might need orders of magnitude more powerful hardware than that still.