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Beowulf Pioneer Lured From Cal Tech to LSU
An anonymous reader writes "Thomas Sterling, a pioneer of clustered computing, including /.'s beloved Beowulf cluster, has has accepted a fully-tenured professorship at Louisiana State University's Center for Computation and Technology, ditching his old post at Cal Tech. From TFA: "At LSU, he hopes to develop the next generation of high-performance computers that will give birth to true artificial intelligence. By making computer chips more efficient, Sterling believes he can change computing by "one to three orders of magnitude" that will transform how humans interact with technology.""
I think for now he'd better focus on developing sea-water powered computers :)
Image a beo.... oh fuck it. Nevermind.
...was last seen moving northeast towards Mississippi at a brisk pace. Sterling should adjust his trip accordingly.
A nerd improves his chances of getting laid...
EvilCON - Made Famous by
Forget any tech achievements this guy has. If he's the Beowulf pioneer, that means he has to be something like a thousand years old. I want to know what sort of anti-aging techniques this guy uses.
Isn't this the wrong week to be moving to Louisiana?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
... comes production and life.
----- You know you have ego issues when you register a domain in your name.
FTA: [Sterling]:"We'll finally stop interfacing with a computer with a keypad," he said. "It's a truly science fiction dream of talking to computers and computers talking back to you."
Great, like I need my computer talking back to me -- I'll be getting enough sass from my teenage daughters by then.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
At LSU, he hopes to develop the next generation of high-performance computers that will give birth to true artificial intelligence.
2theadvocate was down when I tried to read their story, so mirrors please?
I'll comment briefly (WRTFA):
I am sick of the term next generation: it irks me. I think if you're talking about devoting the next twenty years towards developing true AI, then the focus has to be about the direction that could be taken, the nuts and bolts of it all, and what the setbacks could be. High performance computers are like high performance people, in many ways, or at least they should be. Incentives must exist for a metrological system to present itself into the true nature of self and this measure supercedes the facility of overexaggeration, to the point where no truly defined system can surpass the narrow view of purpose devoted by the creator, without being heralded as a foolish endeavour. The heavy processing of high performance computing works against the nature of AI.
True AI means that mistakes will be made by the creator and the subject, and emotions will exist in the subject to counter-attack development stumbling blocks, and assist in development, or improve development of wisdom and ultimate self-awareness comes only from experiences of contrast, pain and pleasure (for example). These precepts have never come into cause with a system yet, because each system is built as an object and not a person; each system is built for a financial purpose and not a scientific purpose.
Science and finance are enemies, strange bedfellows that hate eachother but rely on eachother, in a bad marriage, with nothing to lose and at times everything to lose. How can balance come to this nature, to enable true AI to come forward out of the ashes?
How is it possible at all? I don't see it. I see just another generation of the same thing, so perhaps the term next generation is apt?
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
...the land is going to be cheap, seeing as it's all swamp now.
Finding God in a Dog
"give birth to true artificial intelligence."
Oh wait, all sorts of people have imagined that future, and it isn't pretty, in any of them but Star Trek with Data.
Think of "I Robot" for a recent movie example of an Artificial Intelligence operating in a massive collective. Oh wait, scratch Star Trek too, there's the Borg!
It seems our only hope is to not imagine, or create a cluster of AI robots or life forms.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
At LSU, he hopes to develop the next generation of high-performance computers that will give birth to true artificial intelligence.
In short, he has been given a job for life to do research almost nobody expects anything from anymore.
Wake me up when one of his high-performance computers pass the Turing test, if I didn't die of old age before...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
You can throw as much hardware as you want at the "problem" of AI, but in my opinion, that isn't the easiest route to achieving a breakthrough in AI - it would be like throwing hardware at a dog's brain - the dog would still think like a dog, only 1000 times faster. Sure, you might see improvement in "mechanical reasoning", and chess playing programs and the like, where most of the neccessary conclusions can be reached mechanically (mathematically), but that's about as far as it will go, I think. You won't get the dog to reach non-doggy (for example, human) conclusions by doing that.
The real key to AI lies in software, and superior algorithms. So far in AI, most of the progress has been on the mechanical side - expert systems using algorithms to match and discard possibilities until it finds the "correct" option. This is a good way of doing things for applications that expert systems are currently being utilized for, but to progress to the realm of true (self-aware) AI, scientists need to find out how it works in biological structures first. Once that has been established, computer scientists can try converting those (theoretical) signals into instructions, and plug those into new-generation algorithms.
Liberal Ontarians and French Quebecers are draining Western Canada's wealth. Stop them now! Support Western separatism.
i know its hopeless..but,
his work these days centers around efficiencies of access gained by putting the dram and processing elements on the same die. partially removing the serialization associated with the standard synchronous memory interface. The architecture also plans on using MTA-style threads to hide latency and increase concurrency.
citeseer
Imagine what we could do with a cluster of these guys!
----- In Your Cubicle No One Can Hear You Scream...
Geaux Tigers!!!
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
he hopes to develop the next generation of high-performance computers that will give birth to true artificial intelligence
Let me get this straight. We're geeks. We read science fiction. Much of science fiction is spent talking about the dangers of pushing technology too far too quickly, especially artificial intelligence. We know that corporations like pushing too far too quickly as they can boost their stock prices. Here's a guy saying he wants to create "true" artificial intelligence and we're all-of-a-sudden thinking its a good thing?
Damien
heh...
(ironically, today's CAPTCHA image for me was 'horses')
...on cloud seeding computer models or some form of weather forcast?
:)
Or computer controlled levy pumps or something useful
Just seems as if moving to that area of the country _now_ isn't....safe.
In other news, LSU was seen floating in the direction of Mexico......
The LSU 9000 just doesn't have as nice a ring to it as calling it HAL.
Do really dense people warp space more than others?
Apu: I came here shortly after my graduation from CalTech: Calcutta Technical Institute, as the top student in my graduating class of 7 million.
There is another kind of evil which we must fear most, and that is the indifference of good men. -- Boondock Saints
I think their admission standards went up to a 3.0 HS GPA (exemptions obviously still made).
Skynet will be corrupted by Mardi Gras and thus decide to save all the hot chicks but kill the rest of us.
Do really dense people warp space more than others?
...will be one of those rare above-water ones.
Breca cluster= windows NT farm
And I can't think of anything that would temp me from JPL. (Leaving California earthquakes in favour of hurricanes perhaps?)
Anyway, from TFA: By making computer chips more efficient, Sterling believes he can change computing by "one to three orders of magnitude" that will transform how humans interact with technology.
"We'll finally stop interfacing with a computer with a keypad," he said. "It's a truly science fiction dream of talking to computers and computers talking back to you."
Big deal, I talk to my computers every *bleeping* day, and I am starting to believe that they are talking back ...
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
I still think Beowulf was a writer. How did things get so out-of-hand. (no out-of-hand comments allowed.)
Hell, if I wanted to change the performance of my computer by one to three orders of magnitude, I would just run Vista.
Oh, wait, maybe he meant one to three orders of magnitude faster. My bad.
A republic cannot succeed till it contains a certain body of men imbued with the principles of justice and honour.
By making computer chips more efficient, Sterling believes he can change computing by "one to three orders of magnitude"
So his plan is to ride the Moore's Law wave for 18 to 54 months?
(15 to 1500 years if they meant decimal orders of magnitude, rather than binary)
Well for once beowulf cluster jokes are kind of on topic.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
Allow me to clear up your thinking. Consider Proteus. It is a high-performance simulator written at MIT for MIPS. Some graduate student at LSU ported it to SPARC.
This work is stunningly brilliant and egalitarian.
In the late '80s and early 90s, the eggheads at MIT and Stanford felt that they need only develop simulators for their clique-ish processor: MIPS. Yet, the rest of the world was using SPARC. In this way, the eggheads cornered multiprocessor research for themselves.
LSU actually opened up multiprocessor research to the rest of the world by building a simulator that actually runs on the SPARC machines.
To be fair, I should note that a small team at Stanford did the same thing with ABSS, another simulator that runs on SPARC machines.
Seems like there are few stereo-typical comments I've seen from caltech folks complaining about the submitter's use of "Cal Tech", of course not addressing the fact that Caltech is losing a repected researcher in their center for advanced computer research...
;^) isn't all that can be said about this... :^( WHO CARES ;^)
Hopefully catlech
As an alum I'm a bit disappointed, although I'm not exactly surprized (at caltech, computers have always seemed more about applied science, than a science in themselves)...
Anyhow, just a little venting...
But could you rewrite your statement without superfluous language (i.e. "supercedes the facility of overexaggeration") or vague expressions (i.e. "improve development of wisdom")?
Certainly, I will do so for the purpose of clarity.
I am sick of the term next generation: it irks me.
Next generation indicates that there is only progress extended from previous efforts.
I think if you're talking about devoting the next twenty years towards developing true AI, then the focus has to be about the direction that could be taken, the nuts and bolts of it all, and what the setbacks could be.
More than what is normally considered in developing AI models, would be required in the foundation of true AI.
High performance computers are like high performance people, in many ways, or at least they should be.
Driven people show traits that are above and beyond regular people, but somehow each person still has their own intelligence. People excel differently in situations, and high performers in an organization are rewarded. How can you reward a computer simulation? Should rewards not be part of the foundation of true AI?
Incentives must exist for a metrological system to present itself into the true nature of self and this measure supercedes the facility of overexaggeration, to the point where no truly defined system can surpass the narrow view of purpose devoted by the creator, without being heralded as a foolish endeavour. The heavy processing of high performance computing works against the nature of AI.
A new measurement must exist that is based on the nature of self-awareness, which would have to be the cornerstone of true AI. You have to know these measurements in order to perfect them, and the subject (the being using the AI) will also have to have some connection to these measurements. Humans have pain and pleasure. We are rewarded when we are doing things correctly, and we are punished when we are not. We rely on resources to survive. No AI system today has to face limited resources because their power comes from a bigger system. True AI should be forced to experience a similar measurement to enable self-awareness.
The point; "this measure supersedes any facility of overexaggeration," means that the measurements can not be too noticeable or they will fail. How many of you notice every little nuance, every little adjustment in your mood, in your body? I was pointing at the necessity for subtle, subconscious measures, to propel changes in the AI structure.
True AI means that mistakes will be made by the creator and the subject, and emotions will exist in the subject to counter-attack development stumbling blocks, and assist in development, or improve development of wisdom and ultimate self-awareness comes only from experiences of contrast, pain and pleasure (for example).
I am connecting emotions with the measurements of true AI, so that it can self-guage, and assess events adequately.
Improving the development of wisdom, means that a subject must learn from mistakes and develop an underlying, profound understanding of the subject's environment. This is part of true AI. That is also the reason for the measurements I was discussing.
These precepts have never come into cause with a system yet, because each system is built as an object and not a person; each system is built for a financial purpose and not a scientific purpose.
When you look at true AI, there is a price attached to it. When you look at human development, what did it cost our maker? Do we have a maker? Was there a bottom line? Was there a reward?
Theology has to be present in creating something that will use true AI, mostly because without a creator relationship, the lack of purpose in the subject becomes perhaps a motivator for suicide, depression and other negative side-effects. If true AI will exist, then we must assume that the subject will possess at least some of our own negativity, or they cou
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
His is a predictable move. If after 9 years at Caltech he was still mired in an untenured, non-tenure-track position of "faculty associate", it's natural that he jumped at the chance of becoming a full professor at LSU.
This comment is neither an endorsement nor an attempt to disparage the guy's technical merits, as I don't know the politics going on at Caltech. At least in computer science at Stanford, getting tenure has gotten ridiculously unlikely in the last several years.
Projects that fold often do so not because they're no good, but because the right people never heard about them and/or a lack of imagination in the software's use.
So, definitely the +1 for a brilliant piece of work, but -2 for really crappy follow-up. (Just think of how I rate MIT, then, if I'm savagely ripping places on follow-up!)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Well, you just imagine a Beowulf cluster of hurricanes used to power a Beowulf cluster used to model hurricanes that are usable for powering a Beowulf cluster used to model such hurricanes!
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
[groans]
He wasn't a faculty member at Caltech, he was a research associate. In most cases, infrastructure work, project management, and software development experience are not sufficient to get you tenure at a top university.
Only 4 clusters, one of which (named SuperMike) was the 11th fastest supercomputer on planet Earth and the 2nd fastest supercomputer at any academic institution on planet Earth when it was first benchmarked.
2 years after SuperMike was built, Caltech finally built one faster and caught up with LSU.
<sarcasm>Thank you for displaying your lack of prejudice </sarcasm>
"Alcohol, Tobacco, & Firearms" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
Strange...some of the best friends I've ever had live in Louisiana, including a few in Baton Rouge. On the other hand, the top ten biggest assholes I've ever met were split evenly between SoCal and NYC. Of course, like any place, Louisiana has its share of assholes. I'm sure there are some nice people in SoCal and NYC - I just haven't had the pleasure of meeting them.
Unlike you, however, I don't make sweeping generalizations about a population of millions after meeting a few dozen of them.
Pssst...Careful, your bigotry is showing.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, & Firearms" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.