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Sunday, November 25, 2012

You Are Not A Picture of You

Brain emulation cheerleaders and uploading enthusiasts, please make a note of it.

More Futurological Brickbats here.

2 comments:

jimf said...

I was reading recently that there's a computational model
of the internal combustion engine that apparently requires
(or at least "deserves") the current biggest supercomputer
in the world to run.

I don't think putting the supercomputer in a car would
actually propel it down the road, though. The car, that
is. (Or the supercomputer, for that matter.)

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2012/04/120430-titan-supercomputing-for-energy-efficiency/
-----------------
Neon lines and dots of aqua, violet, crimson, and pink
dissolve into smoky swirls—that's what the burning of fuel
looks like when it is simulated on one of the world's
most powerful supercomputers.

These psychedelic snapshots could pave the way for the
development of cars that use 25 percent to 50 percent
less fuel than the autos of today. But the problem
of improving upon the 150-year-old internal combustion
engine is so complex that the scientists who work
on it are eager for a major development in the supercomputing
world to occur later this year. The U.S. Department
of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee
is set to deploy a massive upgrade to Jaguar, the nation's
fastest supercomputer and Number 3 in the world. The
new system, called Titan, is expected to work at twice
the speed of the machine that is currently the fastest
supercomputer in the world, Japan's K computer.
-----------------

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/10/29/oak_ridge_titan_supercomputer/print.html

Supercomputers sure get **tacky** paint jobs these days!

jimf said...

Where is it I read that chemists and physicists who prefer
to mess about with the "real world" disparage what the
simulation folks do as "type and hype", where as the latter
disparage the former as "shake and bake"?

;->