Bren:Alumni

(1) A Petaflop/sec supercomputer was announced this week. The “Roadrunner” system at Los Alamos National Laboratory, developed by IBM, can perform 1,000,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second. It is composed of 13,000 Cell processors (which can also be found in the PlayStation 3), and 7,000 dual core AMD chips (found in laptops), and 80 TBytes of memory. I believe a key to the performance breakthrough was improvements to the switch network (optical network) connecting the processors. Runs on just 3 megawatts of power.

(2) The Microsoft Surface is now a drink table in Las Vegas which lets you order from the server (in both senses of the word) and flirt with the other clients (also in both senses of the word). Harrah’s Entertainment Group put six of them in the bar at the Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino. They added cameras to the Surface. I suppose that is another sort of optical network improvement. Computers have been in bars since the Atari-based Pong cocktail table games of the mid-1970’s, then the PacMan family on Z80 in the early 1980’s. But “Flirt” is an entirely different sort of game.