Maintained by Seed's editors, web editors, and the other people who make Seed tick, Page 3.14 points you in the direction of some of ScienceBlogs' finest offerings, plus the tastiest tidbits of science news and opinion from around the web.
In this post: the large version of the Technology channel photo, comments from readers, and the best posts of the week!
Reader comment of the week:
In Supercomputer breaks performancing record running model of the human visual system, the Neurophilosopher (of Neurophilosophy) introduces the new IBM supercomputer Roadrunner, which takes up 6,000 square feet of room at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The computer recently broke a performance record when it performed a quadrillion calculations per second while modeling the human visual system.
Reader Josh points out that the machine is still not as impressive as the human brain:
Hmm, 6000 square feet. Slightly less efficient than the few cubic centimetres of visual cortex that normally does this work. Usually takes 30 years to get a microprocessor that does what a floor-sized computer used to do, right?And, I'll bet they'll be using more than the few watts of glucose that the brain uses to power itself.
But reader Ian takes up its defense:
Given that the underlying systems that eventually produced the visual cortex had some 4 billion years of development, I'd say IBM is doing rather well so far....
Yeah, not too shabby...
Some other Technology posts we thought were cool this week were:
A little wine with your Linux?
Legislative reform needed to protect oceans from seafloor mining
Student database to attract hackers
Who gets the push to become an engineer?
Female Coders Do It With Consideration
Look for highlights from other channels coming up!
Technology
Comments
The most impressive analogy about Roadrunner was given when compared to a Cray I.
What would take the Cray I roughly 1,500 years to compute would take the Roadrunner 2 hours.
Several magnitudes in scale I suppose. And the fact that they're doing very cool stuff with Roadrunner makes it a star in my book.
Posted by: Tony P | June 20, 2008 3:28 PM