Monday, March 13, 2017

Big Iron

That's what we used to call mainframes. Today, we got the production hardware for our scalable reporting platform. 10 Nodes, each of which carries 32 CPU's, a terrabyte of RAM and 3 terrabytes of disk. In short, more artificial computing power than existed on the entire planet when I was born.

For a number of reasons, some of which actually make sense, developers aren't allowed in the data center. But, I'm told this setup easily fits in the back of a minivan, even when racked.

Of course, there's still a long way to go before we start bumping off biology. It was only a few years ago that the total artificial computing capacity of the planet surpassed a single human brain. However, it will only be a few years more before a "single" machine can do that (I use quotes because, with all architectures moving towards massively parallel, it's getting increasingly difficult to define a "single" machine; the box boundary is rather arbitrary.) Given that software lags hardware by around 10 years, my estimate of 2030 when machines and humans reach relatively equal footing is looking about right (I've maintained that date since the late 90's).

Yaya will be 27. She's going to have some interesting choices in life.

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