Frustrating parallel vs. sequential EDU moment…

I shared the following tweet with CS1 students on 24 February 02010.

Think parallel instead of sequential. RT @MathIsMyLife:
Sun Microsystems Laboratories – WPI News http://bit.ly/b9By9a

I spent a couple of minutes explaining the difference between sequential and parallel processing.

Here comes the frustrating moment…

The students at WPI (Worcester Polytechnic Institute) were getting an opportunity to hear a lecture by computing guru Guy Steele titled “The Future Is Parallel: What’s a Programmer to Do? Breaking Sequential Habits of Thought.”

After covering the tweet I told the class… “We now return to our regularly scheduled sequential thinking.”

One millionth of one percent

The following quote was on my iGoogle homepage on 02010.02.03.

“We don’t know a millionth of one percent about anything.” — Thomas Edison (d.01931)

Edison’s quote prompted me to come up with the following arithmetic question: What is one millionth of one percent of 1.759 quadrillion?

I used 1.759 quadrillion because the world’s fastest supercomputer could do that many arithmetic calculations in one second (flops).
And, by the way, one millionth of one percent of 1.759 quadrillion is 17,590,000.

In the 21st century, Edison might have said that we don’t know a quadrillionth of one percent about anything.

From 140 to 1,759,000,000,000,000

This semester I have been hammering away at two themes: Twitter and High-Performance Computing.

Twitter is a micro-blogging service that limits postings (i.e. tweets) to a maximum of 140 characters.

During November 02009, TOP500 issued its list of the world’s 500 fastest supercomputers and Jaguar was number at 1.759 petaflops (i.e. 1759 trillion floating-point operations per second).

The lecture notes for weeks 13 (02009.11.16) and 15 (02009.12.01) contained the following tweets.

The Global Language Monitor names “Twitter” the top word of 2009.

I’ve been telling students that I am in the process of learning about Twitter. For me, as of 02009.12.01, the power of Twitter is in who I follow.

President Obama visited China and he had Twitter on his mind.

“First of all, let me say that I have never used Twitter.”~Obama to Chinese

I don’t know why Obama had to let the Chinese in on the fact that had never tweeted.

“I’m a big supporter of not restricting Internet use, Internet access, other information technologies like Twitter.”~Obama to Chinese

Obama referred to Twitter as a form of “information technology” and these days I call this 21st century Informatics. In a nutshell, 21st century Informatics is supercomputer-based data processing.

Al Gore was the keynote speaker at the 21st annual SC conference. SC is an “international conference on High Performance Computing (HPC), networking, storage and analysis.”

At SC09, Al Gore says supercomputing can be killer app in climate change.

Gore believes high-performance computing systems, which include high-performance visualization systems, will help convince the world that climate change is a real problem. Gore might be wise to expect the unexpected.

“Supercomputing has given us the most powerful tool in the history of civilization.”~Al Gore at SC09

A bold statement by Gore and only time will tell if he is correct.

By the way, Steve Wozniak once said, “Never trust a computer you can’t throw out a window.”

Augmenting human intelligence

This was my Facebook posting on 02009.11.20.

It’s all about augmenting human intelligence. What happens if somebody cracks (“hacks into”) a person’s brain implant?

Direct Link Between the Brain and Computers Coming in 2020 [02009.11.20]

“It’s possible now, more than ever, to augment human intellect.” — Bill Joy (from an article about Doug Engelbart titled “The Dream of a Lifetime”)

I tweeted the following two days ago [02009.11.18]…

Covered peta-scale computing in class yesterday. Student asked: Why supercomputers? Tomorrow they’ll see http://ow.ly/DkwZ

Nutshell: “IBM has simulated a brain with 1 billion neurons and 10 trillion synapses–about the equivalent of a cat’s cortex, or 4.5% of a human brain.”

The computing roadmap at the end of 02009: 20 petaflops by 02012 and 1,000 petaflops (one exaflops) by 02018-02020.

[extra] While writing this blog entry, the following tweet from @hrheingold was received.

Engelbart’s 1962 “Augmenting Human Intellect” is well worth rereading every year or two.

I retweeted Howard Rheingold’s tweet and added the following bookmark to my Delicious.com account.

AUGMENTING HUMAN INTELLECT: A Conceptual Framework

Petaflops processing yottabytes

I tweeted the following two tweets on 02009.11.16…

• Jaguar supercomputer hits 1.759 petaflops http://bit.ly/3eInDv

  A supercomputer known as Jaguar has finally bested IBM’s Roadrunner supercomputer in the biannual TOP500 list, but researchers have already begun looking into exascale supercomputers that consist of 100 million cores and run 1,000 times faster than Jaguar.

• Yottabytes of data via PopSci.com “National Security Agency’s
  Surveillance Data Could Fill Two States by 2015″ http://ow.ly/CRGE

  The NSA estimates it will have enough data by 2015 to fill a million datacenters spread across the equivalent combined area of Delaware and Rhode Island. The NSA wants to store yottabytes of data, and one yottabyte comes to 1,000,000,000,000,000 GB.