It feels strange when a milestone that has always seemed far off in the future passes without you noticing. That happened to me this week when I found out that a supercomputer with the same performance as a human brain was built… back in 2008. There is something a little bit creepy about the fact that the world’s largest supercomputers also have names, but this one, built by IBM at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, is disarmingly called Roadrunner. Of course, when we remember that the animated roadrunner easily outsmarted the more likable character Wyle E. Coyote in Chuck Jones’ cartoon, the name no longer seems so inconsequential. Roadrunner is capable of performing 1.5 peta FLOPS (that’s 1.5×10^15 floating-point operations per second). It cost $133 million USD to build and contains 6,480 Opteron processors as well as 12,960 Cell processors. When it’s not being used to simulate nuclear weapon explosions, it spends some of its idle moments simulating portions of the human visual cortex.
In a seminal 1997 paper, Hans Moravec estimated the computing speed of the human brain at 100,000,000 MIPS, or one quadrillion instructions per second, roughly equivalent to the 1.5 petaflop speed record achieved by Roadrunner. Exact calculations on the processing power of a standard human brain vary, but credible projections place it between 1 and 20 petaflops. So even if Roadrunner turns out to me more dunce than Einstein, It is still within an order of magnitude of the smartest humans.
The next super computers are likely to smash the milestone reached by Roadrunner. The NSA has announced plans to build a supercomputer at its Fort Meade headquarters that is likely to top one exaflop, or about 70 times the speed of Roadrunner. The (as yet) unnamed supercomputer will be ready by 2015.
This development has me more convinced than ever that 1) humanity is at a point in its development that might make us intensely interesting to alien observers and 2) the future of our civilization, and perhaps most others in the universe, is non-biological.
Further Reading:
Will we build a galaxy-sized computer?
It’s just crazy, I just was reading this one article on your site with the prediction that a computer like this would be made in 2029. Taking this in consideration, we will reach level two civilization in about 50-60 years. Or Less.
Bruno – imagine how amazed you will be that RoadRunner was superseded by Tianhe1 in Nov 2010 (Tianhe1 did 2.5pFlops) and the Cray XK6 with full-spec… well it’s just a lazy FIFTY Petaflops, and was released less than 5 months after you wrote your comment.
En outre…the following is not directed at you, Bruno)
The silence (the ‘errie silence’) is simple to explain: any civilisation capable of reliable routine interplanetary or interstellar travel will – a fortiori – already have gone through their Singularity.
In fact, any civilisation a generation more advanced than WE are, will have already virtualised.
They will live near-infinite lives, process and store information with perfect recall, are 1/50th the size of a virus, as near to indestructible as makes no odds… and communicate with low-power, directional, encrypted traffic that to us is indistinguishable from background noise.
They have no interest whatsoever in us – why the hell would they? If they wanted to know what it was like to be a hairless chimp (or an elephant) they would simply implant nanoscopes in our systems and sample us perfectly accurately, without our knowing.
Sorry – nobody gets anally-probed in any plausible reality…