11.21.08
The eonic effect and simulations
Supercomputers Break Petaflop Barrier, Transforming Science
A new crop of supercomputers is breaking down the petaflop speed barrier, pushing high-performance computing into a new realm that could change science more profoundly than at any time since Galileo, leading researchers say.
When the Top 500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers was announced at the international supercomputing conference in Austin, Texas, on Monday, IBM had barely managed to cling to the top spot, fending off a challenge from Cray. But both competitors broke petaflop speeds, performing 1.105 and 1.059 quadrillion floating-point calculations per second, the first two computers to do so.These computers aren’t just faster than those they pushed further down the list, they will enable a new class of science that wasn’t possible before. As recently described in Wired magazine, these massive number crunchers will push simulation to the forefront of science.
Perhaps soon scientists will be able to consider a simulation of the stupendous vista of the eonic effect, whose transformational potential, over tens of millennia, yet interacting with all the variables of a cultural matrix, is so vast that it seems unthinkable.