An even bigger computer...
From the SIAI newsletter:
Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology has announced plans to begin building the world's fastest supercomputer in 2006, to be completed by 2011. The supercomputer would be capable of operating at 10 petaflops, or 10 quadrillion calculations per second, roughly 73 times faster than IBM's Blue Gene, the world's present record holder. This value would exceed the estimates by a number of experts for human brain-equivalent computing capacity. Kyodo news reports that the total cost of the project will fall somewhere between 80 billion and 100 billion yen, or $714 million and $893 million.
As noted, that would put this machine in the human brain range. By my earlier math, it would take two of these to match a human brain, for a total cost of about $1.8 billion.
Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology has announced plans to begin building the world's fastest supercomputer in 2006, to be completed by 2011. The supercomputer would be capable of operating at 10 petaflops, or 10 quadrillion calculations per second, roughly 73 times faster than IBM's Blue Gene, the world's present record holder. This value would exceed the estimates by a number of experts for human brain-equivalent computing capacity. Kyodo news reports that the total cost of the project will fall somewhere between 80 billion and 100 billion yen, or $714 million and $893 million.
As noted, that would put this machine in the human brain range. By my earlier math, it would take two of these to match a human brain, for a total cost of about $1.8 billion.