06/05/2011 [PF #169] Drinking to much of the spirit.

[joshofspam]

Seems like another reason might explain the sudden loss of power to clan Daryil.

Did Daryil just go tri-wing and the rest of his clan are just adjusting to the currently unstable energy flow?

Look at all those soul kegs.

[Sienna Maiu - M T]

phht... so much for faking his own death...
he's cheating it.

[Tapewolf]

phht... so much for faking his own death...
he's cheating it.

Unless, of course, the blast atomized him and thereby broke the link to his clan.

[Corgatha Taldorthar]

I vote for the insane crackpot theory, that he attracted the attention of Ghostwheel, and is now floating in a lake of liquid hydrogen and helium, playing for the amusement of the crazy computer

[Turnsky]

given he's nekkid.. he's flashing. 

[Lore]

Made me think of this.

Edit:
Also, I'm curious: what is a machine hour?

I'm assuming it's not an actual unit of time. My basis for this is pretty simple: one quadrillion hours is roughly 117 billion Earth years. While the year may be a different length on Furrae... I doubt the variance is big enough to cram 117 billion Earth years into 200 Furrae years. So that's out. Might be some ridiculously small fraction of a more commonly used unit of time... but that doesn't feel right either.

I mean, someone pointed out that perhaps what you meant was that you had a bunch of computers working this problem for 200 years, thus potentially creating "quadrillions" of machine hours. Breaking out the calculator, that's roughty 590 million computers running nonstop for 200 years. And that's only for one quadrillion machine-hours. Even for the amazing Clan Daryil, that seems like a stretch.

[Chakat Blackspots]

Made me think of this.

Edit:
Also, I'm curious: what is a machine hour?

I'm assuming it's not an actual unit of time. My basis for this is pretty simple: one quadrillion hours is roughly 117 billion Earth years. While the year may be a different length on Furrae... I doubt the variance is big enough to cram 117 billion Earth years into 200 Furrae years. So that's out. Might be some ridiculously small fraction of a more commonly used unit of time... but that doesn't feel right either.

I mean, someone pointed out that perhaps what you meant was that you had a bunch of computers working this problem for 200 years, thus potentially creating "quadrillions" of machine hours. Breaking out the calculator, that's roughty 590 million computers running nonstop for 200 years. And that's only for one quadrillion machine-hours. Even for the amazing Clan Daryil, that seems like a stretch.

Daryil most likely could have also had a huge server farm (or multiple server farms) running on the problem, thus the cumulative amount of time equaling a quadrillion hours from the server farm(s), or a whole planet full of servers.  Of course, Daryil has magic, so he could have used his magic to make these computers faster than regular computers.

[VAE]

Made me think of this.

Edit:
Also, I'm curious: what is a machine hour?

I'm assuming it's not an actual unit of time. My basis for this is pretty simple: one quadrillion hours is roughly 117 billion Earth years. While the year may be a different length on Furrae... I doubt the variance is big enough to cram 117 billion Earth years into 200 Furrae years. So that's out. Might be some ridiculously small fraction of a more commonly used unit of time... but that doesn't feel right either.

I mean, someone pointed out that perhaps what you meant was that you had a bunch of computers working this problem for 200 years, thus potentially creating "quadrillions" of machine hours. Breaking out the calculator, that's roughty 590 million computers running nonstop for 200 years. And that's only for one quadrillion machine-hours. Even for the amazing Clan Daryil, that seems like a stretch.

Remember, Spooks - ever since Paige/Azrael experimented with it, they are capable of dimensional travel. That lends itself to interesting tricks.. like finding an universe with a faster timeflow compared to ours, dumping self-sustained machines there and collecting results when due.
It also questions what he means by machine-hour in terms of CPU's. Also more earthly solutions -  if he split the problem into chunks, he might have many clusters working at it, not all in Furrae. Remember, at this point, the parallel human dimension is capable of making sentient airplanes and R-MACs were copied too.
After all, he might be , thirdly, using machine-hours as a measure of scope of the problem, but use stuff that does it entirely faster. Remember P!=NP is unsolved yet - maybe someone broke it theree  and then ,some really fancy fast algorithms happen.
Hell, souls seem like a good storage media too they can store an entire mind capable of reasoning in almost no volume ... in his place i'd be looking for their use in computing... perhaps by rewiring original content of someone's.

[Tapewolf]

If you had 144'043 processing nodes and each node had 4096 cores, you'd have a cluster with just over 590m processing cores.  If each node had more cores, or you had more nodes in the cluster, you could reduce the time spent correspondingly.

[VAE]

If you had 144'043 processing nodes and each node had 4096 cores, you'd have a cluster with just over 590m processing cores.  If each node had more cores, or you had more nodes in the cluster, you could reduce the time spent correspondingly.

So it's like i said one of meh theories- it's computed by processing core.
For a quadrillion... well, over a million cores kills it down to something like 100 years , at least US quadrillion. So , sweet

EDIT:
DO WANT!
EDIT2:
It seems Ockham's razor works in interpreting fiction , too

[Sienna Maiu - M T]

phht... so much for faking his own death...
he's cheating it.

Unless, of course, the blast atomized him and thereby broke the link to his clan.

Oh, phht...
I just said that he was cheating death.
Geeze.



I also wonder about the jug-things about him.

[Tapewolf]

Oh, phht...
I just said that he was cheating death.
Geeze.

I think that rather than getting all huffy about it, it might be more productive to explain what you meant, because 'cheating death' implies not dying.

[VAE]

Oh, phht...
I just said that he was cheating death.
Geeze.

I think that rather than getting all huffy about it, it might be more productive to explain what you meant, because 'cheating death' implies not dying.

Cheating death might mean using other things instead of the scythe.

[Lore]

If you had 144'043 processing nodes and each node had 4096 cores, you'd have a cluster with just over 590m processing cores.  If each node had more cores, or you had more nodes in the cluster, you could reduce the time spent correspondingly.

Alright, thank you. I genuinely just wanted to know what the term meant/what context it was being used in, and you answered that for me. Not trying to get everyone else all stirred up.

[VAE]

Heh.. this brings me to another thought... if it's that size of machinery, the real skill and awesomeness comes from the fact he was able to set the problem up in  a way it  was doable well by a massive paralllelised array.

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

Indeed. There's an art to that.

Also, running the cluster is kinda tricky, too, since the overhead of managing it tends to mean the management nodes top out of bandwidth before the processor nodes actually get the work done. Workarounds include making it into "clumps" of nodes, so you have a bunch of smaller clusters that work as a team, but each works independently of the others, but again, that has other problems.

It's all a bit of swings and roundabouts. I think ShadesFox would know more about it than I do - my cluster[1] is just a baby one by comparison, with 28 nodes of quad-core goodness and ~220T of storage.

Teeny-tiny. And the main one is smaller still - they haven't shifted over to the big one yet. :-/

[1] ie, the one I'm paid to look after, that someone else does most of the work on...

[Tapewolf]

Alright, thank you. I genuinely just wanted to know what the term meant/what context it was being used in, and you answered that for me. Not trying to get everyone else all stirred up.

I suppose I should confess that I didn't run the math when I chose the order of magnitude.  However, he would want a massively parallel array for the sort of simulation he was running.

[Turnsky]

so now you've got me all curious, when can we expect the next update? when ren comes back from the gulag? 

[Gabi]

Made me think of this.

I was also reminded of that when I read this strip.

[Tapewolf]

so now you've got me all curious, when can we expect the next update? when ren comes back from the gulag? 

Hopefully Friday.  I have the top row already and am working on it.  Ren isn't around at the moment, but resumes studying during this week so it should be harder for him to be taken on an unexpected holiday.