From: Eugen Leitl (eugen@leitl.org)
Date: Fri Apr 12 2002 - 00:24:51 MDT
On 11 Apr 2002, Mike Linksvayer wrote:
> I see software ("what we are able to do with [hardware]") as by far the
> biggest challenge, one reason I don't think protesting that current
> hardware is too slow is very useful. If we had hardware 1000x faster
We have two bottlenecks: hardware, and what we can do with it. If there's
no hardware, we clearly can't do anything. If there is hardware, but no
methods, we don't look too hot, either. Only if there's both we are
golden.
> than current hardware right now what could we do with it (along a
> critical path to AI) that we _can't_ do with current hardware. NB: we
> now have hardware 1000x faster than that available during the mid-80s AI
> hypelet.
Memory bandwidth went up by 10^3 since 1985? Wow. I must have missed more
than just WW3.
As to hardware being irrelevant to real-world problem solving, you'll
notice that the top500.org list growth shows no signs of slacking. If I
indeed had a 1000-node cluster in a desktop volume I could go to places I
couldn't with my current setup. If every Jane and Joe had such machines on
the network, I would consider the SI scenario a lot more probable, as at
least the hardware base would be closer to the requirements.
The first use of a lot of big boxes is to find out how to use them
efficiently. This is a very big, embarassingly parallel task. The more
power you have to burn, the more stupid brute-force approaches we can
afford, as smart approaches are limited by the human resource bottleneck,
which is not getting any wider. Hardware helps a lot here.
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