X-Message-Number: 12937 From: Date: Tue, 14 Dec 1999 11:18:57 +1000 Subject: Blue Gene Just to clarify the issue of Blue Gene. (John Clark has covered most of this already but it seems to have fallen on deaf ears) Thomas Donaldson seems to think that this is no technological breakthrough. Well it is certainly not a new technology, no chemical/molecular/optical blah blahs. But this is its strength - it can be done, it is not likely to disappear from the scene never to be heard of again (with further investigation revealing a insurmountable unforseen problem encountered). There are a number of new challenges to producing this beast. The processors will all be running at 1 GFLOP. Intel Processors do not even come close to this - don't count MHz it is misleading. The processors will be designed to run a new form of instruction set. The new instruction set can be thought of as being to RISC, as RISC is to CISC i.e. a very stripped down and highly optimised set of instructions and much less of them than in a RISC computer. Each chip will have 32 processors (on the same chip) each with the capability of 1 GFLOP Each processor will have all its memory requirements on the same chip running at full clock speed. Basically IBM are going to be into the wafer business making chips that consist of an entire wafer. The speed of the comms between the chips internally and externally will be amazing with one article describing it something along the lines: "it will be able to take the entire contents of the Internet and spit it out in less than a second". The failover and redundancy is going to be very important and IBM are planning to take an existing technology and adapt it and even improve it for this machine. The floor space of the computer used to beat Kasparov in chess was also quoted. I cannot remember if this was in feet or meters. Lets assume it was metres. It took 8000 sqm and the floor space for this new machine will be 2000 sqm. So it will run 500 times as fast and take a quarter of the floor space. The power requirements and cooling requirements will also be less. The task of this machine will be to try and work out how a protein with 300 nucleotides folds. The article suggests that typical proteins are 600 nucleotides long but that this should still produce useful results. To calculate this folding of 300 nucleotides will take this computer a year of constant calculation. At a Quadrillion calculations per second, that works out at just over 31.5 Hexillion instructions or in another way: 31 500 000 000 000 000 000 000 instructions. I am not sure but I suspect that the protein folding problem is exponential so a 600 nucleotide long protein may still be impossible for a very long time. It is still worth remembering that with the existing technology this problem would take 500 years to calculate so nothing is definitely impossible. As for a a cover story, I think this is a bit unlikely. It is going to be tied up for a year and is going to be open to public scrutiny. If it were to be used in AI then that would also be something for IBM to show off. Another possibility would be decryption but this again would be something to show off. Basically IBM saw the benefit they got in terms of recognition after they beat Kasparov in chess and they want more. If they can work out how to fold a protein, they will be in the news and people will talk about it especially if it saves lives. The U$100 Million is for the research project, not for the computer itself. If it is built it could cost significantly more but then one million processors for U$100 Million is a bit unrealistic. A U$1 billion price tag would probably still justify it being built. Although only one small protein fold can be calculated in a year, the lessons learned could enable new techniques to be developed to do it a simpler way. Also a single protein fold might be enough to crack something like Aids which would easily pay for the computer many times over. For cryonics, it's benefit is in 2 areas. We will benefit by the possibility of better health and hopefully thereby increased longevity. This assumes that the protein folding leads to new medical techniques to combat illness and maybe even ageing. It is also useful because if we can fully understand protein folding and large proteins, we can consider how to create a nanomachine by creating a chain of nucleotides that will fold themselves into a fully working nanomachine. This would be a long way off if it is even possible but at least IBM is moving in the right direction. It is also worth remembering that if IBM is successful in this, then they will need a new challenge and then another etc. etc. If they keep focusing in this direction, it certainly will work in our favour. As George Smith effectively said, it costs us nothing but we will probably benefit. Multiple CPUs with memory on a single chip may make it to the desktop PC and what is learnt by IBM may help in this. I feel that IBM may just deliver this beast on time and to spec so lets not bemoan their efforts. Take Care Chris Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=12937