lunes, febrero 23, 2004

Hey, hagamos una supercomputadora

El New York Times reporta hoy (acceso gratis, pero con registro previo) como un profesor y su grupo de estudiantes de posgrado en la Universidad de San Francisco harán historia a la vez que realizan un experimento académico: harán una supercomputadora. Y no solo eso, la harán uniendo en red de alta velocidad más de 1000 laptops en la giimnasio de la escuela. La meta es aparecer en el listado anual de las 500 mayores computadoras de la Tierra, que se publicará en junio.

"It struck me as being something of a 60's idea," said Dennis Allison, a founder of Dr. Dobbs, a Silicon Valley magazine for computer programmers. "This could easily be an idea from one of William Gibson's science-fiction novels, where everyone gathers in Grand Central station to save the world by plugging their machines into the Net."

"When all the machines are plugged together via donated high-speed networking switches, the students will be able to tackle the benchmark program, a series of equations that can be broken into parts and computed on many processors simultaneously. Depending on the size of the problem, Mr. Dongarra said, it could take 1,000 laptops about 4.4 hours to solve. By contrast, a single desktop machine would take about 4,000 hours, while the fastest computer could solve it in 4.8 minutes.

With a thousand people and computers packed into the gym, heat could be a problem, but Mr. Miller said he was not worried because the gym has a high ceiling. After taking a shot at a speed record, the computer will be reorganized to serve as the host of a giant multiplayer video game tournament, he said."

Ahh claro, después de romper el problema matemático, se pondrán a jugar Quake seguramente...
Y dicen que ya no se puede cambiar al mundo, Jajaja.

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