Roadrunner

While babysitting my six-year old niece last Sunday, I came across a magazine in an ice cream shop, with the article below. I tried to put the article in my own words for purposes of this blog entry, but I chose otherwise for fear of not being able to state it correctly and as concisely, so it is here reproduced in full. (It’s just short anyway. Haha.)

When it comes to computational capacity, man has always triumphed over machine. Human brains possess about a quadrillion synapses that relay signals between neurons and function much like transistors in computer chips. Until recently, there was no computer that could process as much data, so fast. But the US$133 million Roadrunner supercomputer at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico works at petaflop speeds. This means it can process a quadrillion calculations every second, just like human brains, to make it the fastest computer in the world. In testing, scientists developed a program dubbed “PetaVision” which allowed it to mimic the way the eye converts images so the brain can understand them. It will also be used to model reactions inside a nuclear weapon. But it’s not all computational destruction. “We’re hoping the Roadrunner will have predictive capability for the environment. We’re hoping to be able to say what will happen,” says lab spokesman James Rickman.