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Hawking Is First User of "Big Brain" Supercomputer

Posted by samzenpus on from the big-machines dept.

miller60 writes "Calling your product the 'Big Brain Computer' is a heady claim. It helps if you have Dr. Stephen Hawking say that the product can help unlock the secrets of the universe. SGI says its UV2 can scale to 4,096 cores and 64 terabytes of memory, with a peak I/O rate of four terabytes per second and runs off-the-shelf Linux software. Hawking says the UV2 'will ensure that UK researchers remain at the forefront of fundamental and observational cosmology.'"

4 of 93 comments (clear)

  1. hawking's been hacked. by notgm · · Score: 5, Funny

    i'm convinced that someone else is controlling what his computer-chair-interface says. perhaps it's even...bum bum bum....a super advanced AI, tricking us all into giving it access to a supercom...oh no! it's too late!

    1. Re:hawking's been hacked. by moderatorrater · · Score: 5, Funny

      I find it hard to believe that Hawking wrote the line

      Me too. Maybe dictated.

  2. Re:I've wondered... by sleiper · · Score: 5, Interesting

    So how do these people get their ridiculously complicated physics stuff crunched by ridiculously complicated machines?

    Because they know the equations for their ridiculously complicated physics stuff, and most physicists are expected to be literate with computer programming. I have two PhD friends, both in Physics (meteorology and cosmology) who are now both hardcore coders due to their training.

  3. Wrong. Both LInux and MS would be doing fine by Viol8 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    because

    A) Silicon graphics had little influence one way or the other on the progress of Linux (or Windows so the same applies) even when they were a big player.

    and

    B) Your average home user would not be willing to pay the multi thousand dollar price tag of an SGI system just to have a version of Unix wirth decent graphics at home.

    Unfortunately both SGI and to a lesser extent Sun missed the signs that x86 PCs were going to rapidly catch up woth the abilities of their workstations and instead of dropping prices to sane levels continued to carry on business as usual as if it was still 1990. And the end result is what you see.