I found this today in my RSS reader:

http://eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=210602671

Most of the article is probably gibberish to anyone who’s reading this but there are two important points. One is the idea of separating applications from the server. The other is the processing power of this system compared to the processing power of the human brain.

If I understand what they’re saying correctly, they plan on allowing applications, even while they’re running, to be re-allocated to different parts of the network in real time. This is a pretty significant leap in stability. To simplify, if a computer that is currently running the program you’re using crashes then the program would automatically be run by a separate computer without interruption. You would essentially never see this system crash unless the entire system went down simultaneously. This can probably tie into the cloud computing idea that I posted about before. Cloud computing could use this technology and so be much more stable than computers, as we know them today, are. You could even tie this into the economy. Network and system outages can be a big drain on business. I know every time the computer system is down where I work we lose customers simply because we can’t solve each problem quick enough by hand.

The other idea is probably a bit more exciting to those who aren’t interested in technology. This system would be able to perform 1000 petaflops which would be the first computer system, that I’m aware of, that beats out the processing power of the human brain. In a nutshell this means we’re one step closer to being able to create artificial intelligence that matches human intelligence. Obviously the system would have to be shrunk down for widespread practical applications and we would still have to figure out how to program the AI but it’s a definite step forward. Maybe in the next couple decades we’ll have to seriously start answering ethical questions about artificial intelligence.

I’m regularly amazed at how much the human race is accomplishing. It’s fun to watch the world change on a daily basis and gives a good argument for optimism (or pessimism too if you’re afraid of change I guess).