Lowering already submarine expectations

Talk about damning with faint praise: the new Russian Borei class submarine "Yuri Dolgoruky" is safer than the "Kursk". You remember what happened to the "Kursk", right?

The consensus on the time-line of the casualty, as per the other military vessels in the area, is though settled at two explosions occurring within a time-gap of two minutes between them. The impact of both explosions ranged in the trinitrotoluene(TNT) force scale, with the first explosion releasing around 100-250 kg worth of TNT force and the second releasing about 3-7 tons of TNT force.

118 Russian sailors died, most likely to problems with torpedo fuel. But the "Yuri Dolgoruky" is safer, because...?

Russia's Vesti TV news says the Yuri Dolgoruky's escape capsule can accommodate the whole crew and float to the surface in an emergency.

Um. So all 107 sailors just have to get from wherever they are (in a submarine so badly damaged that it cannot surface) into the escape capsule, then hope that the damage is not so bad that a) the capsule is blocked from decoupling from the submarine, b) that the capsule's structural integrity is not compromised and c) that the Russian shipyards' engineering expertise is good enough to make a large and complex escape capsule system work the first time that it is used under disaster conditions. Frankly, I'd feel a lot better about the idea if the sub had 3 or more capsules, distributed along the ship, making it more likely that at least some sailors could get off the damaged vessel.

Let me say that I think this capsule is actually a good idea and may well save some lives if things go badly for a Borei class submarine. But comparing it to the situation of the "Kursk" is less than flattering, and disrespectful of the 118 dead sailors. If a 3000kg-equivalent explosion happened on a Borei class submarine, what chance is there that any escape mechanism would help?

Popular Science misses the point

Popular Science has an entertaining plot of rising computing power which is really good from the 1930s thru 1990 or so, but at that point misses the point entirely. It plots current day desktop computing at 500 billion (5 x 10^11) operations/sec for $2000 (about right for a 3 GHz 8-core superscalar desktop) and then at 8.5 x 10^15 ops/sec the Japanese K Computer for a cool $1.25 bn. What it omits is the ease of networking tens of thousands of desktops together in datacenters to form distributed computing systems such as Amazon's EC2 cloud or Google's Skynet (yes, they don't call it that officially but I think we all know where this is headed).

If I put together 20k desktops I'd get a raw 1 x 10^16 ops/sec for a mere $60mm (adding 50% for networking gear and datacenter-level power, cooling which seems about right). You'll note that this is more computing power than the K Computer for 5% of the cost. That is the real triumph of modern day computing - the software and networking to harness efficiently the computing potential of thousands of commodity hardware PCs. The challenge now is to shape problems in a way that such machines can help us solve them.

[For readers expecting another Greek-related tirade, my apologies - normal service will resume shortly.]

Happy 99th Birthday Alan Turing

The father of modern computing, he would have been a year short of his century today -- had not an ungrateful nation, or at least its Crown Prosecution Service of the day, hounded him to an early death. You utter unmitigated bastards.

Although his Turing Machine came to characterise the general programmable computer, it's worth noting that his practical work building on the Polish bombe was very much a specialised highly-parallel application-specific computation engine. I wonder what he would have thought of the evolution of the Field Programmable Gate Array over the past 20 years, as we try to get around the single-thread bottleneck innate in microprocessor design. Yes, yes, quad cores in user desktops these days, whoop-de-frickin'-do - check out Deep Crack and tell me how many 1-U blades you need to glue together to match that performance.

Turing would have felt quite at home in the modern geekosphere. As was noted eloquently in the Jargon File's portrait of J. Random Hacker:

...the ties many hackers have to AI research and SF literature may have helped them to develop an idea of personhood that is inclusive rather than exclusive — after all, if one's imagination readily grants full human rights to future AI programs, robots, dolphins, and extraterrestrial aliens, mere color and gender can't seem very important any more.

RIP Alan Turing. Thank you for everything, and I'm so sorry it came at such a cost for you.