| updated | 2021-08-08 02:08:05 -0600 |
|---|
- Computer technology has advanced so quickly that we cannot reason about computational processes.
- This isn't a matter of technical expertise. Computer scientists with decades of experience are just as likely to trip up as those of us who lack such training.
- Digital electronics time scales are inscrutable; there are as many clock cycles in one second as there are seconds in a human lifetime.
- Computer programs and the processes they describe must be understood at many different levels of abstraction.
Some time in the early months of 2008, I was wedged into a teleconference room at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's Array Operations Center in Socorro, New Mexico, with the rest of the analysis software's development team for the ALMA radio telescope. We had just completed a video call with our colleagues at the European Southern Observatory near Munich. https://public.nrao.edu/ https://aoc.nrao.edu/ https://public.nrao.edu/telescopes/alma/ https://www.eso.org/public/
I was scanning over my notes as the meeting adjourned, and something didn't seem quite right. The details are lost to me now. Someone had thrown out the phrase "VAX MIPS", a Million Instructions per Second (MIPS) on an early-1980s minicomputer. It had been an offhand comment, but had reflected an assumption in the design that I wanted to check. I pulled out my iPhone to get some numbers I had bookmarked. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAX https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAX-11 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_second http://www.roylongbottom.org.uk/dhrystone%20results.htm https://frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/book97/ch3/processor.list.txt
"Ok, I don't think this will be too much of a problem," I told my boss. "After all, this phone can do 400 VAX MIPS." https://toucharcade.com/2008/07/07/under-the-hood-the-iphones-gaming-mettle/
"That thing? 400 MIPS?" With characteristic bluntness, he shook his head: "I don't believe you."
My boss was not particularly stubborn, and certainly not new to the field of scientific data processing. Indeed, he had decades more experience than I. An astronomer's daily work involved data sets of vast dynamic range; the total amount of energy in all the target photons ever collected in the history of radio astronomy wouldn't light up a 20-Watt light bulb. https://www.eamesoffice.com/the-work/powers-of-ten/ https://youtu.be/3mnSDifDSxQ https://youtu.be/uD4izuDMUQA
But however exceptional his intellect or how deep his domain knowledge, my boss was only human. His intuition had failed him, and the exponential weirdness of Moore's Law had claimed its next victim.
I want to explore that weirdness a bit. Rather like Nassim Talib's random walk down Wall Street, the mundane tools of our daily lives bring us into direct contact with phenomena almost beyond human comprehension.
And a signal aspect of this weirdness is that the longer you've been in the business of microelectronic computational devices, the more likely you are to be led astray by your mental model of all the bits involved…
But perhaps the more you know, the more you might enjoy some of these comparisons.
Perhaps it's remarkable how little has changed. Electrons are still electrons, bugs are still bugs, and cranky system administrators are still… cranky. But in the immortal words of Abraham Lincoln, quantity has a quality all its own.
We live in a world indistinguishable from magic, and yet not arbitrary. When I sleep, I dream. When I wake up, the utterly improbable phone is still there, built out of bits that are smaller than a virus, yet still doing mostly what I might expect it to do,
That might be a problem.
Because society is an aggregate of the decisions that we all make.
Doug Englebart's mother of all demos Vannevar Bush: "As We May Think" memex
(most likely).
an old term of art still rattling around:
The VAX-11/780 was a great machine, familiar to an entire generation of scientists and computer professionals.
The GPU on it could crank out quite a bit more than that, depending (as always) upon the definition of "instructions".
the informally defined a performance benchmark for the entire computing industry.