Frankenstein's Other Monster

 

 

“Man," I cried, "how ignorant art thou in thy pride of wisdom!”

Frankenstein

Mary Shelley

 

The following was published in Datacenter Dynamic in March 2012:

The $2B NSA Data Center in Bluffdale, Utah will be designed to break the exaflop barrier with a supercomputer it hopes will be 100 times faster than the world’s fastest, the Japanese K Computer, according to a report published by Wired Magazine.

 

What does all this mean? As the farmer says, "That is a whole bunch of cheese!" The K Computer is manufactured by Fujitsu out of Japan. In the fluid world of supercomputers, for a short period of time in 2011, K was the world's fastest. It was the first to break the level of 10 petaflops (a petaflop is the ability of a computer to do one quadrillion floating point operations per second.) In 2012, IBM took back the crown from Fujitsu with the Sequoia.

The following was taken from the SigularityHub.com in November 2012:

Control Data Corporation's first supercomputer, the CDC 6600, operated at a speed of three megaflops.  A half century later, the most powerful supercomputers are a billion times faster. But even that impressive mark will inevitably fall. Engineers are eyeing an exaflop  (a quintillion operations a second), and some think they’ll get there by 2018.

So if what is published is correct, the biggest, baddest, fastest computer on the planet will reside in Utah. The question which begs to be asked it this - to what end? What will be the purpose of this behemoth? I have said before, I have a tremendous amount of respect for all the good work the NSA has done in the past. For the most part, they have kept us safe.

One of the true classic books of our time, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, is a exploration of good and evil. Many who have read the book believe that once Frankenstein created his monster, he left it to fend for himself. Because the monster was so powerful, and living without control or guidance, it became evil. My fear is just like Hal in 2001, A Space Odyssey, or WOPR, the computer in War Games, our finest technology may be used against us.

With all the revelations that have come to light the past week or two, I am scared and concerned that the monster we are creating is not operating with proper control or guidance. We know that Mary Shelley's book ended badly for many - we don't want our story to end the same way.