Two items today from the world of computing -- hardware and software -- that are of interest to us, although not directly related to nanotechnology.
The first item is about the rapidly increasing power of supercomputing.
Japan has revealed plans to build a supercomputer so staggeringly powerful that it will be five times swifter than the 500 fastest systems on the planet today -- combined.
The supercomputer will boast a peak performance of 10 petaflops and should be completed in 2011... This means it will be able to perform 10 x 1015 mathematical calculations -- better known as floating-point operations (or flops) -- every second. A desktop computer, for perspective, has a maximum performance of roughly one billion flops per second...
The record-breaking behemoth will be used to simulate climate change, galaxy formations and to predict the behaviour of new drugs.
Of course, the "behemoth" completed in 2011 will likely fill most of a room, while the same computing power produced by molecular manufacturing could easily fit in the palm of your hand.
In software, a new program called "Watson" is aimed at improving the way we connect with information on the Internet.
Wouldn't it be great if your computer could do all of the work for you? If, for instance, it would anticipate what you need, search for it, then automatically deliver relevant information. You'd never have to guess the right keywords or lift a finger to type in the address of a search engine.
Well, that's the idea behind Watson, a tool that turns the concept of search on its head.
Freelance writer Michelle Johnson took Watson for a test drive, and delivers her opinion here.
Watson is all about search, but it doesn't index information like a search engine. You configure it to use existing free and premium paid search services and websites by setting up ''connectors" in Watson's ''Site Search Wizard." It then uses built-in intelligence to make educated guesses about what you'd want to search for and automatically finds it as you work.
The program was spawned by researchers at Northwestern University, one of them an expert in artificial intelligence. Released in January, Watson has been recently upgraded to version 2.0. It's available as a beta (or test) product.
The company has tweaked Watson based on user feedback, including the addition of the side-panel results window and a wizard that lets users customize the list of sites and services that Watson searches.
This looks like it might be a useful tool, so I've downloaded the Beta version, and I'll let you know what I think after I've tried it out. My first complaint, by the way, is that it doesn't include support for Mozilla's Firefox, only for Internet Explorer. Grrr...