Thursday, September 12, 2013

Computers break the exaflop barrier


An exaflop is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 (a million trillion, or a quintillion) calculations per second. The world's top supercomputers are now reaching this speed, which is a 1000-fold improvement over those of a decade earlier.This exponential growth will continue for many years to come.
Personal computers are becoming ever more compact and sophisticated, with laptops and other mobile devices far outnumbering desktops. Physical hard drives have become almost redundant, with most storage now done online using "virtual drives" in remote servers, aided by the growth in broadband speeds and wireless communications.
Web applications have reached startling levels of sophistication, especially where search engines are concerned. These not only find keywords in a search, but also interpret the context and semantics of the request, often with voice recognition software. Natural language processing had already begun to emerge some years earlier with Siri and other such tools. This form of AI, acting like a personal assistant, is now even more powerful and versatile.Users can ask highly specific questions and receive detailed answers customised to their exact requirements.

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