Re: OT - IBM's "Blue Brain" project

In article
<noneof-EC5DC8.18550823122007@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Mark Conrad <noneof@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Heh, they will never progress far enough to worry about that
in our lifetime.


According to the article, the IBM guy spent 15 years and
ten million dollars to model a one millimeter long section
of the rat's brain.

Actually, the Swiss team says they're about ten years from modeling a
complete human brain.

You forget that available supercomputer power grows exponentially. The
Swiss team is using a Blue Gene/l supercomputer, currently the fastest
supercomputer on the planet.

Next year, IBM will install the first BlueGene/P supercomputer, six
times more powerful than the Blue Gene/L. By 2010, IBM expects to ship
the Blue Gene/Q, three to six times faster than the Blue Gene/P.

A job that would take millions of dollars on dedicated supercomputers in
the 1990s can now be done on an ordinary home PC. Do you remember Deep
Blue, the chess supercomputer that beat chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov
in 1997? Today, an ordinary midrange desktop machine can beat any chess
grandmaster; nobody stages grandmaster-level man/machine tournaments any
more because they're not interesting any more.

Thinking that something will never be done in our lifetimes because it
currently requires too much money and too much supercomputing power is
incredibly shortsighted.

--
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