Petascale data-centers in Nature [via Boing Boing]: "Every watt that you put into retrieving data and calculating with them comes out in heat, whether it be on a desktop or in a data centre; in the United States, the energy used by computers has more than doubled since 2000. Once you're conducting petacalculations on petabytes, you're into petaheat territory. Two floors of the Sanger data centre are devoted to cooling."
Do we still lack the technology to harness this heat in order to power other things? We can't possibly be this stupid.
I was obsessing over this very issue yesterday afternoon. Believe it or not, this is the fundamental survival problem facing all sentient beings that will ever exist in this universe. If we fail to reconceive our understanding of the relevant physical laws in the next few billion years, we're toast (heh). See here and here. Love your blog by the way. I'm that sixth subscriber or thereabouts that you don't know.
ReplyDelete- Gall
Unfortunately, your links aren't showing up -- please post their urls, I'd love to see 'em.
ReplyDeleteIs 'Gall' short for something? What's the significance of your name?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics
ReplyDeletehttp://www.swiftgear.com/last_question(long).html
Short for Gallus.