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The future is: wow!

A conference on supercomputing in Tampa promises amazing links between man and machine.

By JAMES THORNER
Published November 15, 2006

Bonnie Peiffer, left, listens as Glenn Bresnahan of Boston University describes a solar wind simulation during the International Conference for high performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis at the Tampa Convention Center.
	[Times photo: Daniel Wallace]

TAMPA - The present is amazing enough: super computers that do 280-trillion calculations a second, that simulate nuclear explosions without the need for bombing ranges and that instantly and accurately translate conversations into foreign languages.

But the future outlined at the Tampa Convention Center on Tuesday is nothing short of fantastic: implanted, raisin-sized computers to replace diseased brain cells, artificial red blood cells that would make humans amphibious and Hollywood films beamed directly from your eye glasses to your retina.

Thousands of international scientists, engineers, businesspeople and academics converged on Tampa this week for the world's premier conference on high-performance computing.

Such are the exponential leaps in storage capacity on computer chips - and so improved is the lightning-fast transmission through fiber optics - the field's best and brightest labor to avoid obsolescence. Even the hottest technology of the 1990s finds itself increasingly relegated to the has-been pile with rotary phones and punch cards.

"Right now, my laptop is more powerful than the NASA computer I worked on in the 1990s," said Neal Frink, a scientist with the agency's Langley Research Center who manned a computerized demonstration of a rocket plane called the Scramjet.

The convention center itself suffered from its own form of technological lag.

To handle the 274 exhibitors that included IBM, Cisco Systems, Linux Networx, Sun Microsystems and the Los Alamos National Lab, the convention hall was linked to the outside world with 12 miles of fiber-optic cable. As a result, the display hall boasted a computing power 20,000 times that of the fastest residential Internet service.

Exhibitors this year pushed breakthroughs relevant to the times: Norwegian firm Cyviz displayed a screen that provides 3-D images of underground oil deposits, simulations that help energy companies steer their drills more accurately in tough terrain like the Gulf of Mexico and the North Sea.

"This is like high definition on steroids," said salesman Jeff Eisenhard as he handed disposable 3-D glasses to passersby. "Chevron just bought five."

Other machines projected models of rotating molecular chains so detailed you could almost touch the individual atoms through the 3-D lenses. The benefits include AIDS research. Computers simulated hurricanes, charted melting Arctic ice and diagrammed the floor of the Indian Ocean to predict the force of tsunamis.

That was the present. For a glimpse of the near future, the convention invited visionary inventor and author Ray Kurzweil to deliver the keynote address Tuesday.

Kurzweil, 58, invented the flatbed scanner, the first music synthesizer to perfect the sound of pianos and other acoustic instruments and instant translation software.

His speech veered into a Brave New World, describing an "intimate merger" when men and machines are one, when biology is another branch of information technology.

Supercomputing is already creating methods to turn off genes that, for example, program the body to store fat, Kurzweil said. Other therapies would be more directed to saving lives than slimming the waist.

Kurzweil described microscopic "respirocytes," computerized artificial red blood cells. So vast is their oxygen storage capacity that replacing 10 percent of your red cells with the respirocytes would allow you to sit four hours underwater without breathing.

A tiny computer implanted in the head could replace neurons ravaged by Parkinson's disease.

Once we've fully mapped the brain and reduced the cost of computing to pennies, he said, the possibilities could be endless for integrating machines and man.

"It's not going to be an alien invasion of intelligent machines," Kurzweil said in trying to reassure the crowd.

The show runs through Friday.

[Last modified November 15, 2006, 00:59:58]