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“Welcome my son, welcome…to the machine.”

Pink Floyd, 1975

Twice a year since 1993 the TOP500 project has released a list of sites operating the 500 most powerful supercomputers. This June, in the number one spot is the Cray Jaguar at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, with a benchmark speed of 1.759 Petaflops. A Petaflop is 1,000,000,000,000,000 floating point operations a second. In second place is a Chinese system at the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen, called Nebulae. Nebulae has a benchmark speed of 1.27 Petaflops. The benchmark is used to standardize results, but gives a slower speed than the machine’s theoretical maximum. The theoretical maximum for Jaguar is 2.33 Petaflops, and for Nebulae it’s 2.98. So there are now supercomputers running at 2 Petaflops.

What makes this interesting is that futurist Ray Kurzweil estimates the computing speed necessary to emulate human intelligence is 10 Petaflops, or 10¹⁶ operations per second. A check of the Top 500 lists from the last few years confirms that Moore’s Law is alive and well in supercomputing. In June 2008 the 1Petaflop barrier was breached for the first time by an IBM cluster called Roadrunner at the US Department of Energy at Los Alamos. So it’s reasonable to assume that by June 2012 a machine will reach 8 Petaflops – within striking distance of Kurzweil’s estimate. Two years after that a machine will exist that is nearly twice as fast as brainspeed.

These speeds are opening up entirely new kinds of science. Simulation of complex systems like climate, astrophysics, fusion, and genetics. Researchers will be able to run simulations faster and cheaper for a huge variety of scientific and technological problems which have until now been impossible or prohibitively expensive. The most challenging of these problems is how to simulate operation of the brain’s 100 trillion neurons – the most complex object in the universe.

The Transhuman event horizon is nearly upon us. The merger of our biological intelligence with non biological intelligence is now within one decade. We are in the process of radically accelerating our own evolution. We began doing it inside computers in the 80s, molecular biology labs in the 90s and now we’re about to do it to ourselves. We are entering an era in which we will no longer be the smartest one in the room. By 2020 supercomputers wil be running at 64 Petaflops, more than 6 times brainspeed.

This represents the most fundamental paradigm shift in human evolution – a radical discontinuity in human history.

The TOP500 is a list only includes the systems that are volunteered to them. As Dr. Lockley, of the Oxford Supercomputing Centre, pointed out: “The spooks have got some pretty big machines.” So it appears that within five years either the US or Chinese intelligence agencies will have machines that are capable of simulating human intelligence.

Do we really want the NSA to be the first one on the block to have a functioning AI?

Good morning Wintermute, how are you today?