goeiegenugtig

It’s hard to think what a long way we’ve come as far as computing goes. From Babbage’s Difference Engine, right up to the IBM RoadRunner that currently holds the record as the world’s fastest supercomputer, according to the authority on the top 500 Supercomputers June 2009 list. I was planning to basically just show some photos of the MareNostrum, which is a supercomputer (at one time the world’s 5th fastest), housed in a chapel in Barcelona. It is run by the Barcelona Supercomputer Center and I think it’s beautiful. By the way, Mare Nostrum means “Our Sea” and was used to refer to the Mediterranean, by the Romans, so I have no clue why they would call this computer that.

MareNostrum

What reminded me about it however, was the movie Angels and Demons, a bullshit sensationalist piece of crap. It’s sad that Science and Religion is on opposite sides of the spectrum (unlike the above example), as portrayed in the film, but it doesn’t surprise me, because as far as I’m concerned, religion is the furthest thing that you can find from God and that’s why there’s a divide between science and religion. But even science is not progressive enough – it’s just a stepping stone towards understanding divinity, if something like that is possible at all.

Part of it is getting over the Newtonian way of thinking about things – breaking everything down into their smallest parts and trying to make sense of it through mechanical ways of thinking (read The Turning Point by Fritjof Capra) . Funny enough, by doing this, it was proved that at some point it all breaks down (quantum dynamics), and one has to start thinking more holistically.  Note :  isn’t it funny how Programming also went this route – from procedural, to object orientated (breaking everything up into manageable pieces), to distributed (cloud) computing where the pieces are now getting connected again.

It’s this same tendency that’s responsible for the highest amount of Floating Point Operations (FLOPS) and No, it’s not any single supercomputer that can take the credit for this. The RoadRunner mentioned above’s record is currently at over a trillion (1.105 x 10^15)  or 1.105 Peta Flops per second. Even though this is remarkable, there’s projects out there like the Seti@Home project, which uses distributed computing to decipher radio signals from space in the search for extra terrestrial life and the Folding@Home project (used for protein research) which currently does 7817 x86 Terra Flops per second, so roughly 7.2 PFLOPS ! That’s the power of a holistic approach.