IBM/Dept. of Energy’s Roadrunner Supercomputer achieves a petaflop, but no Singularity yet

There’s too much background to this headline for me to bring you up to speed in a short blog post. Suffice to say, one of my favourite authors and an all round Bright Guy, Ray Kurzweil, wrote a series of books culminating in his latest work, “The Singularity is Near“. In these books Ray talks about how with the rapidly increasing computational power being delivered to datacenters and eventually our desktops, we are approaching a technological singularity where machines will become intelligent, possibly alive and potentially “spiritual”. The level of parallelism in the human brain, when replicated in silicon, will be complemented by the faster processing speed possible with silicon. This is several orders of magnitude faster than our chemical, organic brains. Therefore, not only will this computational creation be alive and intelligent, it will also live thousands of human life times in just a few days. The implications of this are tremendous because a being not bound by age, with that much time and non-degradable computational ability would probably come up with unfathomable ideas and creations. Once the Singularity is achieved, we, the human race, for all practical purposes may as well swipe our access cards and exit the building.

So, it was in light of this background that I read with interest the latest US Dept. of Energy announcement. This is, by the way, the same government agency that runs massive research labs such as Sandia and Lawrence Livermore, and also runs the US Nuclear Program (civilian and military). Their IBM-designed, AMD-powered, Cell-processor based supercomputer, the Roadrunner, has officially achieved a petaflop. This is a thousand trillion calculations per second. In other words, pretty darn fast. What we have not heard is whether the supercomputer suddenly precipitated the Singularity and started singing Nusrat Fateh Ali qawwalis… (because that’s what any highly intelligent sentient being would do).

So there we are, at a petaflop, but no Joy yet (Yes, pun intended for those who get it ) Why is this? well, I can give you my 2 cents. I think getting the hardware to a particular computational ability is the smaller issue. The real issue is what you’re going to run on it that will even have a hope of achieving sentience. That’s where we’re lagging behind seriously. Yeah, there’s interesting stuff happening with neural networks but we’re not even remotely close to a general purpose intelligence, much less self-awareness. Software is where its at. Arguably, if you had the software, a set@home like project would be able to scavenge enough computation from the Internet to create a bigger-than-human-brain computer.

So who’s working on the software? The usual suspects. AI labs at MIT, Stanford and elsewhere, but it almost seems like someone needs to try a radically different approach. Quit the same-old, same-old and go for a new framework and a fundamentally new model. I have some ideas, but I’m not sharing. Till the next one.

And before I forget check out the DoE release…

DOE supercomputer broke the petaflop barrier, conference acknowledges

By Scott M. Fulton, III, BetaNews
June 9, 2008, 6:58 PM

Though unofficial news leaked this morning, this afternoon, independent sources are acknowledging a new fact: A computer made with IBM Cell and AMD Opteron processors can process a thousand trillion operations per second.

This afternoon, the itinerary of the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden was officially altered to make way for a special panel, acknowledging what the US Department of Energy had announced a few hours earlier: Its Roadrunner supercomputer, built by IBM as a unique hybrid of Cell BE and AMD Opteron processors, has recorded an official throughput speed above one quadrillion floating point operations per second — one petaflop.