Mine Is Bigger Than Yours Is
For a slight change of pace this week we're going to turn away from our usual media-related SF topics and go almost live to SuperComputing '09, in Portland, Oregon, where earlier this week it was announced that "Jaguar," the Cray XT5 system at Oak Ridge National Laboratories, has just been named The Most Powerful Computing System in the World by the keepers of the highly regarded Top 500 list. And so, in calm and sober recognition of this serious scientific achievement, we'd just like to take a brief moment now to say—
WE'RE NUMBER ONE! WE'RE NUMBER ONE! IN YOUR FACE, BIG BLUE!
Ahem.
Actually, finally hitting the #1 position is more a marketing triumph than anything else. For one thing, the Top 500 list only goes back to 1993, and so none of the great old Cray systems of yore were ever ranked until they were already well into their cyberdotage. For another, the list only ranks known systems, and there are Others of which we may not speak, so thanks for not asking. Most importantly, though, the Top 500 list is based on the LINPACK benchmark, and we're generally of the opinion that the HPC Challenge is a far more meaningful measure of total system performance. However, trying to communicate this latter point is like to trying to explain why the Formula One circuit is a far better measure of car and driver performance than the Indy 500, and so for the moment, we'll just take our win and smile.
However (again), this also got me thinking: here we are, well into the 21st century, with a plethora of systems now clocking in at well over a petaflop and ten petaflop systems in the readily foreseeable future. So today, let's talk about... computers.
As in science fictional computers. As in big, giant, evil computers, scheming to take over the world. As in, what is the coolest computer you ever ran across in SF? Colossus? Deep Thought? Wintermute? Or conversely, what's the dumbest computer you ever ran across?
Me, I keep coming back to SkyNet as the clearest recent example of the latter:
John Connor: By the time Skynet became self-aware it had spread into millions of computer servers across the planet. Ordinary computers in office buildings, dorm rooms; everywhere. It was software; in cyberspace. There was no system core; it could not be shutdown...
It could not be shut down. Yeah. Right.
Then again, it would be a crime to overlook any artificial intelligence that ever had to match wits with James T. Kirk:
Scotty: Captain! The M-Five Multitronic Computer has taken over complete control of the ship! I cannah shut it down!
Kirk: M-Five?
M5: (sfx: clattering relays) Working...
Kirk: I order you to solve this problem. Calculate the square root of pi divided by zero.
M5: Working... Does not compute! Does not compute! DOES NOT COMPUTE!
(sfx: ZAP!) (pyro: flashpot behind M5 prop)
Scotty: (amazed) Captain! It worked! The M-Five -- it's dead!
Spock: Fascinating. Captain, how did you know that forcing M-Five to solve that equation would cause a catastrophic system failure?
Kirk: It's an old Earth technique, Spock, called the "Blue Screen of Death." It was first tested on the Aegis-class guided missile cruiser U.S.S. Yorktown, back in the late 20th Century. You can look it up in the history tapes, under Windows NT.
Spock: Indeed.
Kirk: Now, isn't it about time for McCoy to interject some dumb-ass joke, so that we can all exit laughing, no matter how many people have just been killed?
Let the arguments begin.
ULTIMAGE GEEK FU runs every Wednesday. Have a question that's just bugging the heck out of you about Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate, Battlestar Gallactica, Farscape, Firefly, Fringe, Heroes, The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Smallville, The X-Files, X-Men, The Man From Atlantis, or pretty much any other SF-flavored media property? Send it to slushpile@thefridaychallenge.com with the subject line, "Geek Fu," and we'll stuff it in the queue.
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