Ray Kurzweil has attracted a lot of attention in the technological community for his viewpoint on the acceleration of knowledge. His widely-read books on the matter are well-reasoned and detailed. They explain the “law of accelerating returns”, which states that the advances in technology has been increasing exponentially since the beginning of time. Yet, Kurzweil’s predictions point to a future in which the very meaning of what it is to be human is challenged. These predictions, regarding artificial intelligence and a global singularity of consciousness make Kurzweil the target of critical attacks and even mockery. Check out this trailer from the movie, Transcendant Man, that illustrates just what the fuss is all about. See also, CNN on Transcendant Man.
NVIDIA Tesla GPU Computing Processor Ushers In the Era of Personal Supercomputing
NVIDIA Tesla GPU Computing Processor Ushers In the Era of Personal Supercomputing
Sometime’s Moore’s Law is simply ignored. This is a discontinuous leap of performance for some vertical computationally-intensive markets and brings the cost/gigaflop down dramatically.
A dedicated, high performance GPU computing solution, Tesla GPU computing processor, deskside supercomputer, and GPU Computing server brings supercomputing power to any workstation or server and to standard, CPU-based server clusters.
“NVIDIA Tesla™ is going to make discovery of huge oil reserves possible through faster and more accurate interpretation of geophysical data.” —Steve Briggs, Headwave, Inc.“NVIDIA Tesla will give us a 100-fold increase in some of our programs, and this is on desktop machines where previously we would have had to run these calculations on a cluster.” —John Stone, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
“NVIDIA Tesla has opened up completely new worlds for computational electromagnetics.” —Ryan Schneider, Acceleware
“Today’s science is no longer confined to the laboratory; scientists employ computer simulations before a single physical experiment is performed. This fundamental transition to computational methods is forging a new path for discoveries in science and engineering,” said Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO of NVIDIA. “By dramatically reducing computation times, in some cases from weeks to hours, NVIDIA Tesla represents the single most significant disruption the high-performance computing industry has seen since Cray 1′s introduction of vector processing.”
