New US supercomputer is fastest on Earth

©Mark Ollig


Since 2016, China has been ranked the world’s leader in supercomputer processing speed.

China’s Sunway Taihulight supercomputer processes data at 125 petaflops, or 125 quadrillion (125,000 trillion) floating-point operations (calculations) per second.

One quadrillion is a 1 with 15 zeros (yes, I looked it up).

This month, the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) publicly announced its newest scientific supercomputer, called Summit.

The Summit supercomputer is an AC922 (Accelerated Compute Server 922) system, built by IBM.

The AC922 supports cutting-edge artificial intelligence and data-intensive applications.

ORNL also announced Summit has taken over the number-one position in global supercomputing processing speed, as it can process data an incredible 200 quadrillion floating-point operations per second (200 petaflops).

Summit’s 200 petaflops of processing power allows it to analyze massive amounts of data – quickly.

It can be mind-bending, trying to understand this kind of computer processing speed. I read, Summit processes data a million times faster than the best laptop computer.

This processing ability will be used for energy research, and to create advanced new materials, including quantum substances.

New fission, fusion, and bioenergy; artificial intelligence innovations, and what had been considered improbable scientific discoveries will become possible using Summit.

Physically, Summit is made up of many individual rows of computer cabinet bays, containing shelves filled with individually-wired computing cards.

The cabinet bay backplanes are linked together, using fiber-optic and electrical cabling.

Approximately 4,000 gallons of water per minute is circulated among the cabinet bays, via an insulated-tube cooling system, to keep the electronic computing components from overheating.

For those wanting some in-depth computing details, the following description of the Summit supercomputer is from the US government’s ORNL website.

“Summit consists of 4,608 computer servers, each containing two 22-core IBM Power9 processors and six NVIDIA Tesla V100 graphics processing unit accelerators. Summit is interconnected with a dual-rail Mellanox EDR InfiniBand network, which provides, overall, 200 gigabits per second throughput to each computer server, and runs a standard Linux operating system from Red Hat in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The system also possesses more than 10 petabytes of memory paired with high-bandwidth pathways for efficient data movement.”

The Summit supercomputer has some nice hardware and software, huh, folks?

Indeed, we have come a long way from the days of those early 1980s IBM personal computers, with their disk operating system (DOS), 256kB of random access memory (or 512kB if one added another chip as I did), 20 MB hard drive, 4.77 MHz Intel processor, color graphics array, cathode ray tube monitor, floppy disks, and full mechanical keyboard.

Ah, nostalgia.

But, I digress; back to the Summit supercomputer.

“Summit’s AI-optimized hardware also gives researchers an incredible platform for analyzing massive datasets and creating intelligent software to accelerate the pace of discovery,” said Jeff Nichols, associate laboratory director for computing and computational sciences at ORNL.

Computing processing firsts at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory include:

• first gigaflops calculations in 1988;

• first teraflops calculations in 1998;

• first petaflops calculations in 2008; and

• first exaflops calculations in 2018.

FLOPS are floating-point operations per second. It’s a measurement of a computer’s performance; I tend to think of it as analogous to the horsepower in a car, if you will.

One exaflop equals one quintillion calculations per second. That’s a 1 followed by 18 zeros.

The first exascale operations per second (exaops; sometimes seen as an exaflop) computing calculation barrier was reached this year, when the Summit supercomputer obtained a staggering 1.8 quintillion calculations in one second, while analyzing millions of genome organism DNA sets as part of its health and human research.

The Summit supercomputer can obtain processing speed within the exascale range only for specific scientific applications.

The Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project (ECP) is researching the possible uses for exascale computing.

“The mission of the US Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project is to accelerate delivery of a capable exascale computing ecosystem that will provide breakthrough solutions to address America’s most critical challenges in scientific discovery, energy assurance, economic competitiveness, and national security,” per the statement on the ECP’s webpage, located at https://www.exascaleproject.org.

Exascale computing will also be used for health and environmental research, creating new superconducting materials, space exploration, and building better aircraft.

I was surprised to learn the Summit supercomputer was able to reach a maximum processing speed of 3.3 exaops, which is a significant step toward achieving full exascale computing in the very near future.

In fact, the ECP’s goal is to have exascale supercomputers processing data by 2021.

Take a visual walk through the rows of the Summit supercomputer bays at https://bit.ly/2K9Zgbw.

Other videos of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory Summit supercomputer are available on the ORNL Dropbox at https://bit.ly/2tFNN8p.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory Summit supercomputer 

Computers versus humans: from chess to a debate

©Mark Ollig

Over the last 20 years, you and I have witnessed impressive displays of the analytical and computational abilities of computers.

One such display was in 1997, when IBM’s supercomputer, nicknamed Big Blue, played a six-game chess tournament against a human.

Mind you, this was no ordinary human chess player.

The supercomputer was playing against the world chess champion and Russian chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov.

This would be the ultimate chess challenge for Kasparov.

The Deep Blue supercomputer used advanced software programming tables, and 200 processors capable of analyzing millions of chess positions per second.

It was a super-intelligent computer when it came to playing chess.

On the other hand, Kasparov could foresee at least 15 chess moves ahead during a game, and was a master of chess strategy.

The chess match began, and after 45 moves, Kasparov won the first game.

However, Deep Blue rebounded, and Kasparov was forced to resign from the second game.

The third, fourth, and fifth games all ended in a draw.

Suspense set in, as the sixth game would determine the winner of the chess match.

May 11, 1997, the final chess game between the computer and Kasparov was broadcast live on television with millions (including me) watching.

Within an hour, and after 18 moves, Deep Blue captured Kasparov’s queen, and for all intents and purposes ended any realistic chances for Kasparov to win.

Kasparov resigned from the game.

The computer won the game and the chess match.

Years later, I read about Garry Kasparov wanting a rematch with the Deep Blue computer; strangely, IBM refused.

“Deep Blue was intelligent the way your programmable alarm clock is intelligent. Not that losing to a $10 million alarm clock made me feel any better,” Kasparov wrote in 2017.

Now that we know a supercomputer can play a decent game of chess; how would one do going up against a couple of humans in a debate?

IBM answered this question June 18 in San Francisco, when a new computing system it has been working on since 2012, nicknamed Project Debater, battled wits against two professional human debaters.

To give you a visual perspective; Project Debater’s computing intelligence is contained within a 5-foot-tall rectangle frame designed like a monolithic domino.

The topic of this debate: Make a case for government-subsidized space research.

Rules of the debate included a four-minute opening and rebuttal, and a two-minute summary statement by the computer and the humans.

The debate took place in front of a live audience.

With access to hundreds of millions of newspaper articles and other source material, such as academic journals, and even Wikipedia, Project Debater was well-armed with information to analyze, build, and defend its position.

And so, the great debate began.

“Subsidizing space exploration is like investing in really good tires. It may not be fun to spend the extra money, but ultimately, you know both you and everyone else on the road will be better off,” reasoned the IBM debater computer using a female voice.

“IBM debater can have all the opinions in the world, but IBM debater does not pay taxes, and we do,” one of the human debaters quickly said.

The computer calmly responded, “You are speaking at the extremely fast rate of 218 words per minute; there is no need to hurry.”

The audience laughed.

The computer continued, “Such research would enrich the human mind, inspire young people, and be a very sound investment.”

So, who ended up winning the computer versus human debate?

While an official winner was not chosen, according to those watching in the audience, the humans “were better speakers and more persuasive,” while the AI debating computer “was more knowledgeable.”

Members of the audience also believed they learned more from the computer.

This debate was a look at how the future of AI technology will interact with people.

AI will contribute its analytical resources and algorithmic perspective in future decision-making scenarios.

“What we are trying to accomplish here, is really to demonstrate that we can have a meaningful and valuable discussion between man and machine,” said IBM researcher, Noam Slonim.

It is hoped AI will add to the conversation and augment specific discussions by offering facts, opinions, and performing a “different kind of argumentation.”

Currently, IBM’s Project Debater AI computing system is still in the research stage.

I learned we won’t need to have a physical AI computer; IBM is making the computing system’s AI resources available as a cloud service.

Their goal is for organizations to build persuasive arguments and make well-informed decisions using artificial intelligence.

Time will tell for whom and what purposes future AI decisions will be made.

A short video by IBM Research introducing Project Debater can be seen at https://bit.ly/2ylxW4M.

The webpage for IBM’s Project Debater is https://ibm.co/2t9dsHc.

Photo by IBM 

YouTube continues to grow

©Mark Ollig


A new YouTube statistical analysis report shows more than 1.5 billion users each month are uploading, downloading, or live-streaming over their video-sharing website.

Surprisingly, this means one-third of all us on the internet are regular users of YouTube.

YouTube was founded Feb. 14, 2005, and is headquartered in San Bruno, CA.

The first video appeared on YouTube April 23, 2005, when its co-founder, Jawed Karim uploaded his 19-second video, titled “Me at the Zoo.”

During this video, Karim briefly talked about elephants while visiting the San Diego Zoo. This video has been viewed more than 51 million times.

In 2006, Google saw how popular the YouTube video website was becoming and realized its potential, so it purchased the company from its three owners for $1.65 billion.

As of 2017, the annual cost to operate YouTube is about $6.5 billion; its yearly revenues amount to around $13 billion.

Not too bad of an investment by the Google folks.

Recent statistics show mobile/smart devices accounting for more than half of the YouTube videos being viewed.

On average, 30 million people view videos on YouTube each day.

The number of videos being uploaded to YouTube equals 300 hours per minute.

One statistic I found interesting: 80 percent of YouTube users are from outside the US.

Local versions of YouTube are available in 88 countries and 76 languages.

More than 5 billion videos have been shared off of YouTube.

The fastest growing demographic group using YouTube are those over 35 years of age.

Males reportedly account for 62 percent of YouTube users.

Nostalgia is the primary reason for 75 percent of the adults viewing YouTube videos.

How-to-tutorials, sports, history, comedy, and current event videos are also popular.

Although YouTube is accessible over the internet, certain countries block their citizens from accessing it for various social and political reasons.

Countries currently blocking YouTube include China, Iran, North Korea, and Turkey.

In Germany, approximately 60 percent of YouTube’s most popular videos cannot be viewed. The reason is attributed to Germany’s musical copyright laws governed by an organization called GEMA.

As you read this column, some 50 million people are creating video content for YouTube.

More than 1 billion hours of YouTube content are being watched each day.

Other statistics reported 60 percent of people would rather watch online videos than live television.

If after the first 10 seconds a video doesn’t interest you, count yourself among the 20 percent who will stop watching it and move on to another.

The average online video viewing period lasts 40 minutes.

Not long ago, YouTube began offering a $40 per month online TV service. Called YouTube TV, it is advertised as a “Cable-free live TV” service, and offers many favorite network channels.

Currently, more than 300,000 subscribe to YouTube TV. You can find more information at https://tv.youtube.com/welcome.

See the first YouTube video “Me at the Zoo,” via this shortened link: https://bit.ly/1ddZLsM.

YouTube blocked in Turkey redirect page

YouTube TV Networks 

From multiplication facts to STEM

©Mark Ollig


I must confess; third grade math was one of my toughest educational challenges.

My learning multiplication facts (times tables) for Mrs. Elizabeth Seymour’s math class would never have happened if it were not for my mother.

Each day after school, mom quizzed me, using multiplication flashcards she had purchased from the local Dueber’s store in Winsted.

An added incentive to my learning (only after passing her multiplication quiz for the day), was being allowed to watch my favorite evening 1960s television show, “Lost in Space.”

After many daily quizzes, I finally memorized all those multiplication facts. My mom is to thank; she never gave up on me.

Some 50 years later, I still have those multiplication answers stored in my memory, along with how to play “Hello Dolly” on the piano, which she taught me when I was 13. I occasionally play it for her when visiting; she will nod her head and smile.

Today’s students must find it strange to think of a time when there was no internet, Web, smartphones, iPads, laptops, or even pocket calculators for looking up a multiplication problem.

And no, my third-grade classroom did not have any manually operated, mechanical calculating machines sitting on our desks.

However, the students in the high school trigonometry class were using “mechanical analog computers” called slide rulers.

When I attended high school in the mid-1970s, our junior class was allowed to use electronic pocket calculators; which meant no more fidgeting with slide rulers.

The pocket calculator I used was a 1975 Texas Instruments TI-1200 model. Worked great, too.

Here is one comforting quote regarding math, “Do not worry about your problems with mathematics. I assure you mine are far greater,” said theoretical physicist, Albert Einstein.

As many of you know, STEM stands for science, technology, engineering, and math.

STEM of Minnesota is an educational website promoting STEM courses and learning resources for school students, parents, teachers, and youth workers.

The Minnesota Department of Education, Minnesota High Tech Association, Minnesota Business Partnership, and the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce support STEM of Minnesota.

Its goal is to help students pursuing a rewarding career using innovative technology skills.

The STEM of Minnesota website has several multimedia tools available.

Some of the tools include various study guides, easy-to-read equation charts for trigonometry, geometry, physics, algebra, and chemistry.

Technology course careers STEM can assist with include: automotive design, computer hardware and software, music recording engineering, game software development, architecture design, and others.

Teaching resources for educators are also available on the STEM website.

The STEM of Minnesota website is http://www.mn-stem.com.

Other STEM online resources include the Minnesota Academy of Science (MAS), which is a statewide organization dedicated to promoting interest in and appreciation of science.

The MAS website is http://www.mnmas.org.

The Minnesota SciMathMN website “advocates for effective, engaging and rigorous science, technology, engineering and mathematics education opportunities for all Minnesota students.”

The SciMathMN website is http://scimathmn.org.

Understanding a specific technology involves more than just facts and information; it also requires a resourceful person who can expand technology’s ability to beneficially integrate into various facets of our daily lives using innovative methods.

Students will have many career choice opportunities for applying their newly-acquired STEM skills. They will also make discoveries to help solve today’s existing technological challenges.

“The great thing in the world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving,” said Oliver Wendell Holmes.

The Minnesota Department of Education STEM webpage is https://education.mn.gov/MDE/dse/stds/stem.

Students participating in STEM education are building a solid foundation for their future careers.

Learning those multiplication facts will come in handy, too.

Digitizing the Vatican Library

©Mark Ollig


Pope Sixtus IV, whose papacy lasted from 1471 to 1484, is credited with opening the resources and transcripts of the Vatican Library to scholars in 1475.

By the early 1950s, many Vatican transcripts and letters had been electronically processed onto microfilm and microfiche, including 37,000 pieces from the Vatican Library.

One used an electronic reading device with a magnifier to view the Vatican information contained on the reel of microfilm or flat sheets of microfiche – you might remember using such a device at your school’s library, back in the day.

In 1995, the Vatican began planning the digitizing of its massive archive library of manuscripts, printed books, drawings, paintings, photos, coins, medals, and other materials, so they could be seen, studied, and researched by the public, online, via the internet.

“Bringing the computer to the Middle Ages and the Vatican Library to the world,” said the late Father Leonard Boyle in 1995.

Father Boyle, a specialist in medieval manuscripts, led the effort of bringing online the many thousands of Vatican Library manuscripts – some dating back hundreds of years B.C.

“A library like this one will last forever. I say it bluntly and unequivocally. It’ll last as long as it lasts,” Father Boyle added.

A new Vatican project called DigiVatLib (Digital Vatican Library) began in 2010.

DigiVatLib provides free internet access to the Vatican Library’s ever-growing digitized collections.

The Vatican Library has more than 80,000 printed books and hand-written manuscripts currently being digitized.

In total, there are approximately 40 million images being digitized.

With such a massive project, the Vatican Library needed to prioritize which materials would be digitized first, so they came up with the following precedence:

Physical manuscript delicacy, fragility, and loss of data vulnerability;

Importance and preciousness;

Selections granted for cooperative projects;

Scholar’s’ requests.

Many of the parchments and manuscripts are fragile and thus, extra time and care are needed to preserve their physical stability while being digitally scanned.

Professional scanning equipment was brought in to avoid any damage to the parchment materials during the digital scanning process.

“Even in a best-case scenario, we will need a couple of decades to fulfill our ambitious goal,” the DigiVatLib website disclosed May 17, 2016.

DigiVatLib established the following goals for making the newly-digitized Vatican Library materials easily accessible for scholars and others:

Give an unprecedented level of uniform and productive access to image-based resources hosted around the world;

Define a set of standard application programming interfaces that support interoperability between image repositories; and

Develop, cultivate, and document shared technologies, such as image servers and web clients, which will provide a world-class user experience in viewing, comparing, manipulating, and interpreting images.

The online user experience provides display functions, including the ability to zoom, browse, and “turn pages” of many of the digitized manuscripts and books.

I noted enhanced search boxes with various word filters to assist in finding particular material.

Individual digital galleries include Selected Manuscripts; containing digitized manuscripts of most significance, and, Latest Digitized Manuscripts; featuring a gallery of newly-digitized, handwritten codices or manuscripts from hundreds, and more than 1,000 years ago.

If you’re ever in Vatican City, stop by the Vatican Library’s Periodicals reading room; it’s open to the public. There, you can see more than 180,000 manuscripts; 1,600,000 printed books; 8,600 incunabulum books and pamphlets (published before 1501); 300,000 coins and medals; 150,000 prints, drawings and engravings; and more than 150,000 photographs.

Many of the above items mentioned are also viewable online at the Vatican Library website.

Although the complete digitizing of all the Vatican archived collections won’t be completed until around 2036, many thousands of historical documents and items are viewable online right now.

The Vatican Library internet website can be reached at https://www.vaticanlibrary.va (“.va” is the Vatican’s internet country-code). The site is in Italian, but it allows you to choose the English language from the homepage.

The DigiVatLib website is located at https://digi.vatlib.it (“.it” is the internet country-code for Italy).

Father Leonard Boyle was born Nov. 13, 1923, and passed away Oct. 25, 1999.