Quote:
Originally Posted by AX17609
More powerful than the guidance computer on the spacecraft, but not more powerful than the banks of computers that supported the mission.
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Current mobile computing is even impressive against that and most people don't really know how much compute power we all have today.
For an idea of how you can be dazzled by something streaming, an event or how your shopping and banking work.... A few months ago I was provisioning a Microsoft cloud virtual machine that's a helper tool for our Cisco security platform. I noticed I could provision 4 TB of RAM and 128 CPUs with the option to buy the across the Internet quality of service features that give huge deployments the performance we all feel. You can manage that with your new iPhone.
I recall a little news highlight on a display wall at NASA and their data visualization. The cluster of computers that drove a wall of 30 huge displays was 120+ compute nodes each with 2 TB of flash memory.
Ever see the Real Earth site from University Of Wisconsin space science & engineering? I know the scientist who does one of those data layers. He was at a party Friday and was describing previously unheard of and unimaginable capabilities they have now that compute power is so easily scalable. I believe it's the NASA GOES satellite system they run there. A friend who's now at CalTech was in the news recently saying for his research on climate it's like going down a hall lit by a candle and now they're making it much brighter all the time.
I go by the space science and engineering physics buildings on campus fairly often. I confess that I smile about those mostly young people working so hard. My data center is near campus. If I have to be there at 2 AM I see the partiers going home but also some leaving the engineering and health sciences buildings with their backpacks. It's fun to think about what those beautiful young people might do for the world when that same span of decades passes.