19 Comments
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David Perlmutter's avatar

Super doesn't necessarily mean better. Ever since Friedrich Nietzsche originated the concept of the Superman (translated from the original German Ubermensch) in the 19th century, we have regularly seen the prefix used both positively and negatively in fact and fiction.

The super-computer of fiction I most know of is Colossus, the subject of a trio of SF novels by D.F. Jones. It conquers the world and has to be overthrown...

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Andrew Smith's avatar

Interesting. Colossus is the name of the UK codebreaking machine from WWII... any connection there in the novels?

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David Perlmutter's avatar

Could be...I think Jones was British, so he might have known of it...

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Andrew Smith's avatar

For sure, it would have been strong in the public's consciousness shortly after the conclusion of WWII. The UK government needed Colossus to win, and so did the Allies.

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Andrew Sniderman 🕷️'s avatar

I see your big hot tubes and raise you a heat sink

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Andrew Smith's avatar

Crap, I thought for sure I was wearing pants today.

Wait, what?!?

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Andrew Sniderman 🕷️'s avatar

LOL

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hexheadtn's avatar

I used supercomputers daily in my jobs since 2000. We built our own Beowulf cluster in 2000 (100 cheap nodes of off-the-shelf components). When I left things had blown up exponentially hardware wise. Software is quite a different in a parallel environment.

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Andrew Smith's avatar

Did you mention you were at Oak Ridge? I can't remember if I ever told you my grandfather helped build the place.

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hexheadtn's avatar

So cool that your grandfather helped build it. A whole town was created for the Manhattan Project. Was he part of that?

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Andrew Smith's avatar

Nah, he was from SC, so I reckon getting to Oak Ridge (right as the spending ramped up like crazy) must have seemed very appealing to him. I suspect the proximity made the trip possible, in other words. My family, once in the US, hasn't traveled much historically.

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hexheadtn's avatar

I am the only one in my family to travel extensively. Couldn't have done it without institutional support. I have fallen ass-backwards into most of my work. :-)

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Andrew Smith's avatar

My folks pretty much never leave their state! It's very much our generation, I think.

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hexheadtn's avatar

My dad barely leaves the house, not even for a meal, much less travel. I call him a hermit, and I am not close behind. HA! I have certainly had more opportunities than he ever did.

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hexheadtn's avatar

I interviewed with national lab in 2001, shortly after my master's degree. Loved the people and those connected with it. I had verbally accepted an offer. Then the job at Vanderbilt was created for am and I couldn't turn it down. I was looking at the Tennessee Mouse Genome Consortium and what they were into (my thesis advisor saved me by suggesting I check it out.) I was working at an ink jet knockoff manufacturer (https://www.amazon.com/nukote-ink-cartridges/s?k=nukote+ink+cartridges) and needed to break out and use my recent education (Cybernetics). If you follow your bliss, doors will open that you never suspected (https://www.jcf.org/.)

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Daniel Nest's avatar

Man, that was a super post.

But yeah...tech progress over the last century (and now AI progress over the past two years) is cray-cray!

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Andrew Smith's avatar

Knee of the curve, dude. Knee of the curve.

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Brian's avatar

Frontier is a Cray! The top three fastest supercomputers are all HPE Crays.

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Andrew Smith's avatar

Still on top! Nice.

I hear there's currently one being built for X/Grok that is bigger, and a notably bigger one in Japan in the works. Maybe this is good stuff for us to discuss next week.

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