Technut News

Dubai: By 2025 you will be able to buy the computing power of the human brain for $1,000 (Dh3,672), according to Dr Colin Harrison, a director and “Master Inventor” for IBM.

Harrison, who recently took some time to speak to Gulf News on a trip to the UAE, said the estimate is based on the current state of super-computers, which IBM has a long history with.

The company built Deep Blue, a machine designed to beat Russian Chess Champion Gary Kasparov, about 12 years ago and it is currently producing a line of high-performance machines called Blue Gene.

“Deep Blue has roughly the processing capacity of a lizard, and the early Blue Genes has roughly the processing capacity of small rodent,” said Dr Harrison. “If you want to get to the processing capacity of a human being, I think you need something like 10 petaFLOPS.”

How fast it that? The fastest version on the Blue Gene runs at 500 teraFLOPS, which means about 500 trillion mathematical operations per second.

Harrison said that there are some people at IBM who think it would be possible to run the entire internet on Blue Gene, although he says that would only cover “the front end on the internet,” such as websites, and not the large behind-the-scenes computations done in data centers.

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