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Abundant Computing in the News
Two pieces in the last few days, building on themes from the Exchange at CalIT2:
SiliconValley.com has a piece on IBM's newest mainframe - the first to break the petaflop barrier:And Technology Review has a fascinating article about social simulation, a field I've tracked since I first started getting interested in urban planning. It was always considered the domain of uber-geeks but now is starting to show signs of fruition and may enter the mainstream."People thought a petaflop might be in 2012," said Herbert Schultz, a marketing manager for IBM deep computing. "As an industry, we may be a few years ahead. This is going to be in 2008."
The website of the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, for instance, lists papers with titles such as "Cascades of Failure and Extinction in Evolving Complex Systems." Epstein's new book collects his own papers since 1996; an accompanying CD lets readers watch runs of the models described in the text and explore the models on their own. In the projects described in the book, Epstein and his collaborators modeled, in addition to the Anasazi, the emergence of various phenomena: patterns in the timing of retirement; social classes; thoughtless conformity to social norms; patterns of smallpox infection after a bioterrorist incident; and successful, adaptive organization.