Monday, February 23

This is an old article, but it illustrates a very good point:

The ... Earth Simulator ... is five times as fast as the [next fastest supercomputer] and is being used by the Japan Marine Science and Technology Centre to make predictions about the future of the Earth's climate and its crust.

... The previous record holder, ASCI White at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in the US, was built by IBM and is used to simulate nuclear weapons explosions.

How appropriate that a computer simulating the earth trumps a computer built to simulate destruction. To continue the analogy, we can also say that this represents the shift from mechanistic, war-like, simplistic thinking to a complex, holistic, systems world-view.