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IBM Claims Breakthrough Energy-Efficient Algorithm
jitendraharlalka sends news of a claimed algorithmic breakthrough by IBM, though from the scant technical detail provided it's hard to tell exactly how important the development might be. IBM apparently presented its results yesterday at the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics conference in Seattle. The breathless press release begins: "IBM Research today unveiled a breakthrough method based on a mathematical algorithm that reduces the computational complexity, costs, and energy usage for analyzing the quality of massive amounts of data by two orders of magnitude. This new method will greatly help enterprises extract and use the data more quickly and efficiently to develop more accurate and predictive models. In a record-breaking experiment, IBM researchers used the fourth most powerful supercomputer in the world... to validate nine terabytes of data... in less than 20 minutes, without compromising accuracy. Ordinarily, using the same system, this would take more than a day. Additionally, the process used just one percent of the energy that would typically be required."
I guess they stopped using Windows Vista?
"What kind of data? What are they trying to extract? And for what end?"
The web. Porn. Fun.
In that order.
...for analyzing the quality of massive amounts of data...
I have an algorithm that does that in O(1):
return "Not the best quality, but pretty good.";
My UID is prime. Hah!
Now you just need the brains. Brains to design the system, brains to drive the investigation, and brains to try to improve the algorithms the system uses. ... Er, but what are we going to do with all the people who just don't "have" the brains?
Mmmm, brains ...
The fans on servers have variable speed. Case closed.
I believe that you will find those fans can still run at variable speeds with the case open.
What?
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!