The Macintosh Plus computer was the third model in the Macintosh line, introduced on January 16, 1986, two years after the original Macintosh and a little more than a year after the Macintosh 512K, with a price tag of US$2599.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Plus

Retrocomputing (a portmanteau of retro and computing) is the use of early computer hardware and software today. Retrocomputing is usually classed as a hobby and recreation rather than a practical application of technology; enthusiasts often collect rare and valuable hardware and software for sentimental reasons. However some do make use of it.[1] Retrocomputing often gets its start when a computer user realizes that expensive fantasy systems like IBM Mainframes, DEC Superminis, SGI workstations and Cray Supercomputers have become affordable on the used computer market, usually in a relatively short time after the computers' era of use.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrocomputing

Con il termine retrocomputing si indica una attività di "archeologia informatica" che consiste nel reperire, specialmente a costi minimi, computer di vecchie generazioni, che hanno rappresentato fasi importanti dell'evoluzione tecnologica, ripararli se sono danneggiati, metterli nuovamente in funzione e preservarli.

it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrocomputing

Brookhaven National Laboratory is arming its scientists and engineers with a cutting-edge tool to advance their research. Brookhaven’s Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN) and the Chemistry Department will use this big boost in computing power, called Blue Gene/Q, to tease out new ways to put nanoscale materials to work. In particular, Blue Gene/Q will decode and map out the complex array of chemical reactions that can occur on a single nanoparticle with greater speed and precision than ever before.

Image credit: Carlos Jones/ORNL

Try to visualize a beautiful woman. Give it some seconds serious consideration. I shall wait patiently as long...

Now the woman you picture in you head, not only has form and shape, she most likely even have mannerisms and perhaps are wearing clothes. If so we can even with wisdom assume that the clothes she is wearing is consistent with, and thus reflect, the person she is and here is my point. She is to the mental effect almost a person, as your imagination is a VERY powerfull tool. - Mind you not even the Tihane-2 (The Chinese supercomputer) would be able to create in memory what you just did in seconds. (Further more, the Tihane-2 would probably answer that beauty is subjective and continue in long explanations to explain the beauty of binary simplicity, but be quite indifferent as in regard to the beauty of women.)

In your head, from the quest was launched, you started drawing upon your feminine resources of data in your eyes putting together a pretty much ”perfect” women ;o) But make no mistake, in a way she is VERY real, as she is created only and alone from YOUR subconscious imaginative spectrum of what a ”beautiful women” consist of. Those perceptions are not only VERY real, to you it is the whole world and thus, the very definition of beauty.

If you are a crossdresser, transvestite or transexual, you know very well what powers are to be drawn from within that imaginative spectrum, but make no mistake. When ordinary macho heterosexual men watch Expendables 1 (Macho hetero classic - 5 stars from my male side, Lisa says ”No comment!” shaking her head) they very much identify them self, with being amongst such group of battle scarred veterans, knowing each others weaknesses and strengths, using them in unison, like a team, working like clockwork and on backbone alone beating odds no sane person would bet a single dime on.

Women as well have their own visual identification spectrum and I stand accused making following statement without statistic documentation, but I have notion practically all women at some time, have imagined them self walking into a crowded room drawing all attention, dazzling everyone with the mere presence of their radiant beauty. But again, I might be mistaken and women not only may, but trust me will rightfully claim ”What the hell do I REALLY know about women.” and it is in fact quite true.

Never the less there is still much to be obtained from within, the almost magical imaginative spectrum.

You see, something happens to macho heterosexual men, watching not ONLY Expendables 1, but every film made in modern times that has to do with war, fighting, death, violence and murder (several times). Slowly, we find, such identification change such individuals. The same thing happens to T-girls who spend much time in the imaginative female spectrum, they change slowly, becoming more like that in reality as well, changing slowly.

Thus watching many movies on war identifying with being a vengeful warmachine, might actually in a stressfull situation, combined with a life crisis, trigger the hidden imaginative being nurtured by such imagination, making that person pick up a riffle going into warmode showing the world a thing or two. Where as a T-girl in same stressfull life crisis, very well might say ”Fuck it all.” pick up a pair of stilettos and wearing a tight skirt ”showing” (though in a more practical sense) the world a thing or two as well.

youtu.be/rSSgM94sSxQ

Starring Richard Egan, Constance Dowling, Herbert Marshall, John Wengraf, Philip Van Zandt, and William Schallert. Directed by Herbert L. Strock.

When two scientists at a top-secret government installation devoted to space research are killed -- in their own test chamber, seemingly by an experiment gone awry -- Dr. David Sheppard (Richard Egan) is sent out from Washington to investigate. Sheppard mixes easily enough with the somewhat eccentric team of scientists, though he always seems in danger of being distracted by the presence of Joanne Merritt (Constance Dowling), who serves as the aide to the project director Dr. Van Ness (Herbert Marshall) but is, in reality, another security agent. Sheppard is as puzzled as anyone else by the seemingly inexplicable series of events overtaking the installation -- properly operating equipment suddenly undergoing lethal malfunctions, and the radar tracking aircraft that aren't there -- until he puts it together with the operations of NOVAC (Nuclear Operated Variable Automatic Computer), the central brain of the complex. But the mystery deepens when he discovers that NOVAC was shut down during one of the "accidents" -- and even the computer's operators can't account fully for the whereabouts of GOG and MAGOG, the two robots under the computer's control.

"...and then without warning, the machine became a frankenstein of steel," says the sensationalist poster text. This is the third story in Ivan Tors' OSI trilogy. His first "Office of Scientific Investigation" story was Magnetic Monster in early 1953. The second was Riders to the Stars in early '54. With Gog the loose trilogy is complete. Unlike the Star Wars trilogy in which the stories build upon each other, each of the three OSI stories are separate tales which have nothing to do with each other. The common thread is the idea of there being a sort of Science FBI agency whose job it is, is to check out the scientifically strange. In that regard, Tors' OSI is a bit like a foreshadowing of the X-Files TV series, but without any of the New Age paranormal focus.

In keeping with the previous two stories, Gog is more of a detective murder mystery movie. Tors was a huge fan of "hard" science, not fanciful fiction fluff, so Gog, like the other two movies, is chock full of reveling in sciencey stuff in an almost geeky way. This reverence for real science keeps things from getting out on shaky limb, as many sci-fi films to. The events are much more plausible, less fantastic.

Synopsis

At a secret underground research facility, far out in the desert, scientists working on preparations for a manned space mission, are getting murdered mysteriously. Two agents from the OSI are dispatched to solve the mystery and keep the super secret space station program on track. The scientists are killed in various ways, mostly through equipment malfunctions. The facility director and the agents suspect sabotage. Small transmitter/receiver boxes are found within equipment in different parts of the facility. They suggest that someone on the outside is transmitting in the "malfunctions" in order to kill off the program's scientists. Occasional alarms indicate some flying high intruder, but nothing is clearly found. One of the base's two robots, named Gog, kills another technician while it's mate, Magog, tries to set up an overload within the base's atomic pile. The OSI agents stop Magog with a flame thrower. Meanwhile, interceptor jets scramble and find the highflying spy jet and destroy it with missiles. Once the trouble is past, the Director announces that they will be launching their prototype space station the next day, despite the sabotage attempts to stop it. The End.

The time spent reveling in techno-geekery has a certain Popular Science charm to it. There's an evident gee-whiz air about space and defense sciences which is fun to see. People were fascinated with things rockety and atomic. For various fun bits, see the Notes section.

Gog oozes Cold War from every frame. First is the base's underground location to make them safe from A-bombs. Next is the mysterious killer trying to stop the space station program. The high-flying mystery plane is "not one of ours." (that leaves: Them, and we all knew who they were.) The space station is to be powered by a solar mirror. Even that benign mirror has sinister possibilities. While demonstrating the mirror, the scientists use it to burn a model of a city. "This could happen...if we're not the first to reach space," says the Director. Space is the next "high ground" to be contested. At the end of the movie, when discussing the launch (despite the sabotage attempt) of the prototype space station, the Director says, "Through it's eye, we'll be able to see everything that goes on upon this tired old earth." The Defense Secretary says, "Nothing will take us by surprise again." An obvious reference to Pearl Harbor.

B-films often re-used props and sets from prior films in order to save on their budgets. Gog, even though shot in Eastman Color, was no exception. Two old prop friends show up in Gog. One is our venerable old friend, the space suits from Destination Moon ('50). Look for the centrifuge scene. The research assistants are dressed in them, and as an added bonus, they wear the all-acrylic fish bowl helmets used in Abbot and Costello Go to Mars ('53). Our second old friend is scene in the radar / security room, (the one with the annoying tuning fork device). Check out the monitor wall. It's been gussied up a bit, but it is the spaceship control panel wall from Catwomen of the Moon and Project Moon Base -- complete with the empty 16mm film reels on the right side. It's fun to see old friends.

B-films often include stock footage of military units, tanks, jets, battleships, etc. to fill things out. Gog is no different, and even commits the common continuity error of showing one type of plane taking off, but a different kind in the air.

What amounts to a small treat amid the usual stock footage of jets, some shots of a rather obscure bit of USAF hardware -- the F-94C Starfire with its straight wings and huge wing tanks. In 1954, the Starfire was one of America's coolest combat jets, yet we hear little about it. The swept-wing F-86 Sabers (which we see taxiing and taking off) were the agile fighter which gained fame over Korea. They're common stock footage stars. The F-94, with its onboard radar (in the nose cone) was deemed too advanced to risk falling into enemy hands. So, it didn't see much action , and therefore little fame. The heavier, yet powerful F-94C (one of the first US jets to have an afterburner) was 1954 America's hottest Interceptor -- designed to stop high flying Soviet bombers. It's blatant cameo appearance in Gog, intercepting the high-flying mystery plane, was a fun little bit of patriotic showing off.

The very name of the movie, Gog, is charged with meaning to American audiences of the mid 50s, though virtually lost on viewers of the 21st century. The names of the two robots, Gog and Magog, come from the Bible. More specifically, from the prophecies of Ezekiel (Chapter 38) and the Book of Revelation (chapter 20). While just who they are (nations? kings?) has been debated for centuries, their role as tools of Satan in the battle of Armageddon is clear. Mainstream American patriotic Christendom had settled on the idea that the Soviet Union was the prophesied "nations from the north" who would join Satan to oppose God. This gives the title of the movie a special Cold War significance. It also puts an interesting spin on the Dr. Zeitman character for having named the two robots in the first place. Since they were tools of the mega-computer NOVAC, what was he saying about NOVAC?

It is interesting that the base's radar could not detect the mystery plane (which was beaming in the 'kill' instructions to NOVAC) because it was made of "fiberglass" which rendered it invisible to radar. Now, fiberglass itself isn't sturdy enough for high-speed jets, and it would take until the 1990s before composite materials advanced to make the dream of a stealth aircraft a reality. Nonetheless, the dream (or nightmare) of stealth aircraft was on-screen in 1954 in Gog.

The super computer, NOVAC, controlled everything on the base. Even though the machines were not really killing scientists on their own, but following human orders from the mystery plane, there was the on-screen depiction of machines having a murderous mind of their own. (all pre-Steven King) In the techno starry-eyed 50s, it was fairly uncommon for the technology itself to be turning on its masters. This idea would gain traction later in the 50s, and especially in the 60s, but in '54, it was unusual.

A cautionary subtext to Gog is the danger of trusting in a supercomputer to manage defenses and a whole base. NOVAC doesn't go bad on its own, as the computer will in The Invisible Boy, Hal in 2001 or Colossus in The Forbin Project. In this movie, it was the nefarious "others" who hacked into NOVAC to make it do the killing, but this just demonstrates the danger. People were getting a little nervous about letting machines take over too much responsibility. We were starting to distrust our creations.

Until Gog, robots were fairly humanoid.

They had two legs, two arms, a torso and a head. Audiences had seen the mechanical Maria in Metropolis ('27), the fedora-wearing metal men in Gene Autrey's Phantom Empire serial ('35). The water-heater-like Republic robot appeared in several rocketman serials. There was the gleaming giant Gort in The Day the Earth Stood Still ('51) and the cute left over fedora-dudes in Captain Video ('51). The metal giant in Devil Girl from Mars ('54) was also humaniod, in a chunky way. Gog and Magog were a departure from the stereotype. They were noticeably in-human, which was part of the mood.

Bottom line? Gog seems a bit bland, as far as sci-fi tends to go, but it has a lot in it for fans of 50s sci-fi.

In June Summit was ranked No. 5 on the Green500 list, and among the systems that qualified using Level 3 fidelity, the Green500’s standard for highest measurement fidelity, Summit was No. 1.

Jim Rogers, OLCF computing and facilities director, made Summit’s energy efficiency a priority. For example, Summit’s cooling system removes waste heat using water that measures 70 degrees Fahrenheit.

During its High Performance Linpack run, Summit delivered 14 billion floating point operations for each watt of electricity.

Summit’s power usage effectiveness is 1.03, meaning for every dollar spent on electricity, only 3 cents goes toward distribution and heat removal.

+ Read the full story: www.olcf.ornl.gov/2018/08/29/faces-of-summit-creating-a-g...

Unretouched as of right now - Meet Boomer II. The fastest and most advanced supercomputer the state Oklahoma has ever launched.

At the University of Oklahoma.

One Light: Bare SB900 w/Blue Gel fired behind the model (chose blue for the cool techno look). There's no fill - the SB900 flooded the space enough to shed some light on the side of his face.

Sandia National Laboratories engineer David J. Martinez examines the cooling system at Sandia’s supercomputing center. His design for the new system is expected to save 4 million to 5 million gallons annually in New Mexico, and hundreds of millions of gallons nationally if the method is widely adopted. Called the Thermosyphon Cooler Hybrid System, the system cools like a refrigerator without the expense and energy needs of a compressor.

Learn more at bit.ly/2bBUcXq.

Photo by Randy Montoya.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory unveiled Summit as the world’s most powerful and smartest scientific supercomputer on June 8, 2018.

With a peak performance of 200,000 trillion calculations per second—or 200 petaflops, Summit will be eight times more powerful than ORNL’s previous top-ranked system, Titan. For certain scientific applications, Summit will also be capable of more than three billion billion mixed precision calculations per second, or 3.3 exaops. Summit will provide unprecedented computing power for research in energy, advanced materials and artificial intelligence (AI), among other domains, enabling scientific discoveries that were previously impractical or impossible. Image credit: Carlos Jones/ORNL

Roman Samulyak of Brookhaven Lab’s Computational Science Center with a Blue Gene/Q — a next-generation IBM supercomputer that will be used to simulate scientific experiments at Brookhaven.

The Computational Science Center at Brookhaven Lab is home to several supercomputers that enable scientists to gain new insights through numerical experiments and simulations. There, scientists and mathematicians combine applied mathematics, computer science, and physics theory to develop sophisticated models, numerical algorithms, and supercomputer codes to simulate complex systems such as particle accelerators and energy sources.

FROSTBURG (CM-5)

The Connection Machine (CM-5) was built by the Thinking Machine Corporation located in Cambridge Massachusetts. The CM-5 system named FROSTBURG was first installed by the agency in 1991 and used until 1997. It was the first massively parallel processing supercomputer purchased by the National Security Agency. The original computer system was configured with 3 cabinets and 256 CPN's (Cypress Processor nodes). A single CPN is equal to 1 CPU (central processing unit) in a home computer except that a CPN can process data at a much faster rate. In 1993 FROSTBURG was upgraded with an additional 256 CPN's bringing the total to 512. The system cost approximately $25M. FROSTBURG had a total of 500 billion words of storage capacity (500 Giga-words). This system was used to perform higher level math calculations. FROSTBURG could perform perform 65 billion calculations per second.FROSTBURG could take a job and break it into 512 pieces and work on each piece simultaneously making it much faster to complete its work. The light panels you see were used for checking CPN usage and running diagnostics on the machine.

CM-5 SPECIFICATIONS

a) 512 PN's (Processor Nodes) 256 CYPRESS & 256 VIKING nodes.

b) The CYPRESS nodes contained eight million words of memory for each PN. The VIKING nodes contained two million words of memory for each PN. Each word of memory had a 32-bit word size.

c) Each processor had local memory, vector execution memory interface units and a network interface.

d) Each processor had the capability to perform 128 million floating point operations per second (MFLOPS). A total of 65.5 billion floating point operations per second (BFLOPS).

e) CMost operating system was an enhanced version of UNIX, optimized to support parallel computation, communication, and I/O.

f) The system could be partitioned into groups divisible by 8 (8, 16, 24, 32, 64, 128, 256).

Source en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Frostburg-nsa-description.jpg

also see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine

Part of the new Dutch petascale national supercomputer, "Cartesius", provided and built by Bull.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory unveiled Summit as the world’s most powerful and smartest scientific supercomputer on June 8, 2018.

With a peak performance of 200,000 trillion calculations per second—or 200 petaflops, Summit will be eight times more powerful than ORNL’s previous top-ranked system, Titan. For certain scientific applications, Summit will also be capable of more than three billion billion mixed precision calculations per second, or 3.3 exaops. Summit will provide unprecedented computing power for research in energy, advanced materials and artificial intelligence (AI), among other domains, enabling scientific discoveries that were previously impractical or impossible.

Credit: Genevieve Martin/ORNL

Engineering project lead David Martinez inspects a thermosyphon cooler on the roof of Sandia’s supercomputer center. The unit saved 554,000 gallons of water during its first six months of operation.

Learn more at bit.ly/37z4aFL.

Photo by Randy Montoya.

Largest available image (so far) of the event horizon of a black hole in the galaxy Messier 87 seen by the Event Horizon Telescope. This particular image released by the European Southern Observatory. Color/processing variant.

Original caption: The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) — a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes forged through international collaboration — was designed to capture images of a black hole. In coordinated press conferences across the globe, EHT researchers revealed that they succeeded, unveiling the first direct visual evidence of the supermassive black hole in the centre of Messier 87 and its shadow. The shadow of a black hole seen here is the closest we can come to an image of the black hole itself, a completely dark object from which light cannot escape. The black hole’s boundary — the event horizon from which the EHT takes its name — is around 2.5 times smaller than the shadow it casts and measures just under 40 billion km across. While this may sound large, this ring is only about 40 microarcseconds across — equivalent to measuring the length of a credit card on the surface of the Moon. Although the telescopes making up the EHT are not physically connected, they are able to synchronize their recorded data with atomic clocks — hydrogen masers — which precisely time their observations. These observations were collected at a wavelength of 1.3 mm during a 2017 global campaign. Each telescope of the EHT produced enormous amounts of data – roughly 350 terabytes per day – which was stored on high-performance helium-filled hard drives. These data were flown to highly specialised supercomputers — known as correlators — at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy and MIT Haystack Observatory to be combined. They were then painstakingly converted into an image using novel computational tools developed by the collaboration.

youtu.be/rSSgM94sSxQ

Starring Richard Egan, Constance Dowling, Herbert Marshall, John Wengraf, Philip Van Zandt, and William Schallert. Directed by Herbert L. Strock.

When two scientists at a top-secret government installation devoted to space research are killed -- in their own test chamber, seemingly by an experiment gone awry -- Dr. David Sheppard (Richard Egan) is sent out from Washington to investigate. Sheppard mixes easily enough with the somewhat eccentric team of scientists, though he always seems in danger of being distracted by the presence of Joanne Merritt (Constance Dowling), who serves as the aide to the project director Dr. Van Ness (Herbert Marshall) but is, in reality, another security agent. Sheppard is as puzzled as anyone else by the seemingly inexplicable series of events overtaking the installation -- properly operating equipment suddenly undergoing lethal malfunctions, and the radar tracking aircraft that aren't there -- until he puts it together with the operations of NOVAC (Nuclear Operated Variable Automatic Computer), the central brain of the complex. But the mystery deepens when he discovers that NOVAC was shut down during one of the "accidents" -- and even the computer's operators can't account fully for the whereabouts of GOG and MAGOG, the two robots under the computer's control.

"...and then without warning, the machine became a frankenstein of steel," says the sensationalist poster text. This is the third story in Ivan Tors' OSI trilogy. His first "Office of Scientific Investigation" story was Magnetic Monster in early 1953. The second was Riders to the Stars in early '54. With Gog the loose trilogy is complete. Unlike the Star Wars trilogy in which the stories build upon each other, each of the three OSI stories are separate tales which have nothing to do with each other. The common thread is the idea of there being a sort of Science FBI agency whose job it is, is to check out the scientifically strange. In that regard, Tors' OSI is a bit like a foreshadowing of the X-Files TV series, but without any of the New Age paranormal focus.

In keeping with the previous two stories, Gog is more of a detective murder mystery movie. Tors was a huge fan of "hard" science, not fanciful fiction fluff, so Gog, like the other two movies, is chock full of reveling in sciencey stuff in an almost geeky way. This reverence for real science keeps things from getting out on shaky limb, as many sci-fi films to. The events are much more plausible, less fantastic.

Synopsis

At a secret underground research facility, far out in the desert, scientists working on preparations for a manned space mission, are getting murdered mysteriously. Two agents from the OSI are dispatched to solve the mystery and keep the super secret space station program on track. The scientists are killed in various ways, mostly through equipment malfunctions. The facility director and the agents suspect sabotage. Small transmitter/receiver boxes are found within equipment in different parts of the facility. They suggest that someone on the outside is transmitting in the "malfunctions" in order to kill off the program's scientists. Occasional alarms indicate some flying high intruder, but nothing is clearly found. One of the base's two robots, named Gog, kills another technician while it's mate, Magog, tries to set up an overload within the base's atomic pile. The OSI agents stop Magog with a flame thrower. Meanwhile, interceptor jets scramble and find the highflying spy jet and destroy it with missiles. Once the trouble is past, the Director announces that they will be launching their prototype space station the next day, despite the sabotage attempts to stop it. The End.

The time spent reveling in techno-geekery has a certain Popular Science charm to it. There's an evident gee-whiz air about space and defense sciences which is fun to see. People were fascinated with things rockety and atomic. For various fun bits, see the Notes section.

Gog oozes Cold War from every frame. First is the base's underground location to make them safe from A-bombs. Next is the mysterious killer trying to stop the space station program. The high-flying mystery plane is "not one of ours." (that leaves: Them, and we all knew who they were.) The space station is to be powered by a solar mirror. Even that benign mirror has sinister possibilities. While demonstrating the mirror, the scientists use it to burn a model of a city. "This could happen...if we're not the first to reach space," says the Director. Space is the next "high ground" to be contested. At the end of the movie, when discussing the launch (despite the sabotage attempt) of the prototype space station, the Director says, "Through it's eye, we'll be able to see everything that goes on upon this tired old earth." The Defense Secretary says, "Nothing will take us by surprise again." An obvious reference to Pearl Harbor.

B-films often re-used props and sets from prior films in order to save on their budgets. Gog, even though shot in Eastman Color, was no exception. Two old prop friends show up in Gog. One is our venerable old friend, the space suits from Destination Moon ('50). Look for the centrifuge scene. The research assistants are dressed in them, and as an added bonus, they wear the all-acrylic fish bowl helmets used in Abbot and Costello Go to Mars ('53). Our second old friend is scene in the radar / security room, (the one with the annoying tuning fork device). Check out the monitor wall. It's been gussied up a bit, but it is the spaceship control panel wall from Catwomen of the Moon and Project Moon Base -- complete with the empty 16mm film reels on the right side. It's fun to see old friends.

B-films often include stock footage of military units, tanks, jets, battleships, etc. to fill things out. Gog is no different, and even commits the common continuity error of showing one type of plane taking off, but a different kind in the air.

What amounts to a small treat amid the usual stock footage of jets, some shots of a rather obscure bit of USAF hardware -- the F-94C Starfire with its straight wings and huge wing tanks. In 1954, the Starfire was one of America's coolest combat jets, yet we hear little about it. The swept-wing F-86 Sabers (which we see taxiing and taking off) were the agile fighter which gained fame over Korea. They're common stock footage stars. The F-94, with its onboard radar (in the nose cone) was deemed too advanced to risk falling into enemy hands. So, it didn't see much action , and therefore little fame. The heavier, yet powerful F-94C (one of the first US jets to have an afterburner) was 1954 America's hottest Interceptor -- designed to stop high flying Soviet bombers. It's blatant cameo appearance in Gog, intercepting the high-flying mystery plane, was a fun little bit of patriotic showing off.

The very name of the movie, Gog, is charged with meaning to American audiences of the mid 50s, though virtually lost on viewers of the 21st century. The names of the two robots, Gog and Magog, come from the Bible. More specifically, from the prophecies of Ezekiel (Chapter 38) and the Book of Revelation (chapter 20). While just who they are (nations? kings?) has been debated for centuries, their role as tools of Satan in the battle of Armageddon is clear. Mainstream American patriotic Christendom had settled on the idea that the Soviet Union was the prophesied "nations from the north" who would join Satan to oppose God. This gives the title of the movie a special Cold War significance. It also puts an interesting spin on the Dr. Zeitman character for having named the two robots in the first place. Since they were tools of the mega-computer NOVAC, what was he saying about NOVAC?

It is interesting that the base's radar could not detect the mystery plane (which was beaming in the 'kill' instructions to NOVAC) because it was made of "fiberglass" which rendered it invisible to radar. Now, fiberglass itself isn't sturdy enough for high-speed jets, and it would take until the 1990s before composite materials advanced to make the dream of a stealth aircraft a reality. Nonetheless, the dream (or nightmare) of stealth aircraft was on-screen in 1954 in Gog.

The super computer, NOVAC, controlled everything on the base. Even though the machines were not really killing scientists on their own, but following human orders from the mystery plane, there was the on-screen depiction of machines having a murderous mind of their own. (all pre-Steven King) In the techno starry-eyed 50s, it was fairly uncommon for the technology itself to be turning on its masters. This idea would gain traction later in the 50s, and especially in the 60s, but in '54, it was unusual.

A cautionary subtext to Gog is the danger of trusting in a supercomputer to manage defenses and a whole base. NOVAC doesn't go bad on its own, as the computer will in The Invisible Boy, Hal in 2001 or Colossus in The Forbin Project. In this movie, it was the nefarious "others" who hacked into NOVAC to make it do the killing, but this just demonstrates the danger. People were getting a little nervous about letting machines take over too much responsibility. We were starting to distrust our creations.

Until Gog, robots were fairly humanoid.

They had two legs, two arms, a torso and a head. Audiences had seen the mechanical Maria in Metropolis ('27), the fedora-wearing metal men in Gene Autrey's Phantom Empire serial ('35). The water-heater-like Republic robot appeared in several rocketman serials. There was the gleaming giant Gort in The Day the Earth Stood Still ('51) and the cute left over fedora-dudes in Captain Video ('51). The metal giant in Devil Girl from Mars ('54) was also humaniod, in a chunky way. Gog and Magog were a departure from the stereotype. They were noticeably in-human, which was part of the mood.

Bottom line? Gog seems a bit bland, as far as sci-fi tends to go, but it has a lot in it for fans of 50s sci-fi.

Image credit: Genevieve Martin/ORNL

The NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) Data Exploration Theater features a 17- by 6-foot multi-screen visualization wall for engaging visitors and scientists with high-definition movies of simulation results. Here, the wall displays a 3.5-kilometer-resolution global simulation that captures numerous cloud types at groundbreaking fidelity. Credit: NASA/Pat Izzo To learn more about NCCS go to: www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/climate-sim-center.html ( www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/climate-sim-center.html ) NASA Goddard Space Flight Center is home to the nation's largest organization of combined scientists, engineers and technologists that build spacecraft, instruments and new technology to study the Earth, the sun, our solar system, and the universe.

Image credit: Carlos Jones/ORNL

Another move by the U.S. is the passing of the CHIPS Act in an attempt to bring semiconductor manufacturing back to the country. I highly doubt we can succeed on that. The $1.7 million price tag for a single small public toilet in San Francisco clearly shows the high costs and inefficiency on doing just about anything in the U.S.

Besides, it's estimated that we will need 50,000 new engineers in the next 5 years in order to fill our reshoring needs. One university, Perdue, is supposed to increase their engineering graduates from 150 per year to 1,000 per year. As shown in the just released National Education Assessment Report, students math score declined in all 50 states. Where will we find these 50,000 new engineers? Can we really import so many of them?

finance.yahoo.com/news/san-francisco-building-single-publ...

San Francisco building single public toilet that will cost $1.7 million and won't be completed until 2025

finance.yahoo.com/news/why-us-tech-controls-on-china-coul...

Why US tech controls on China could end up hurting American semiconductors

When the US first banned sales of certain tech products to Chinese tech firm Huawei three years ago, it crippled a once-proud national champion and sent ripples across the US semiconductor industry. In the quarters following that export ban in May 2019, top American chipmakers reported a median revenue decline of 4% to 9%.

The Biden administration’s latest tech controls threaten to accelerate those losses, throwing the global semiconductor sector into disarray. And Chinese companies targeted by the new regulations won’t be the only ones feeling the pain.

“If China really wants to be as aggressive as the US and retaliate, there could be a lot of impact for other companies in the US,” said Edith Yeung, Race Capital General Partner, in an interview with Yahoo Finance Live (video above). “This is beyond impact on revenue for Intel (INTC) or Qualcomm (QCOM) or NVIDIA (NVDA).”

The US has long been a global leader in semiconductors, commanding roughly 45% to 50% market share. However, that leadership has been built on global demand for its products, with China consuming roughly 75% of semiconductors sold globally.

Chinese device makers alone accounted for roughly a quarter of global semiconductor demand in 2018, according to a study by Boston Consulting Group (BCG).

'More than just a preventative tool'

That innovation cycle is at risk of being picked apart, with the Biden administration’s sweeping tech controls, aimed at freezing China’s semiconductor development and dramatically limiting critical technology exports from the US

“Technology export controls can be more than just a preventative tool,” said National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, ahead of the administration’s announcements. “If implemented in a way that is robust, durable, and comprehensive, they can be a new strategic asset in the US and allied toolkit to impose costs on adversaries, and even over time degrade their battlefield capabilities.”

'A sea change' in policy

Specifically, the new measures block sales of semiconductors critical to the development of artificial intelligence, supercomputers, and other advanced technologies, unless companies receive exemptions. It also expands an existing ban to sell advanced chip-making equipment to Chinese firms.

In a broad escalation, the Biden administration’s actions also restrict US firms and citizens, including permanent residents, from supporting China’s development of advanced chips.

The restrictions announced earlier this month have already created a chilling effect.

At least 43 senior executives are American citizens working with 16 publicly listed Chinese semiconductor companies, according to the Wall Street Journal. Western firms like Dutch equipment maker ASML Holding NV have suspended American employees from working as a precaution, while they seek further clarity. What's more, Apple temporarily halted plans to use memory chips from China’s Yangtze Memory Technologies Co. in products, according to Nikkei Asia.

“This is really a sea change in policy… the U.S. is imposing a freeze-in-place strategy toward China's indigenous chip development,” said Reva Goujon, Rhodium Group Director. “[The semiconductor sector] is an interdependent, interlocking ecosystem where all the parts kind of have to be in place for things to work to be able to upgrade to more and more advanced levels. So, if you cut the legs out from under that production cycle, you can really cause a lot of disruption, which is exactly what the US intent is.”

Impact on US chipmakers

The disruption may not be limited to Chinese firms. A 2020 study by BCG estimated that US companies could lose 18% of their global market share and 37% of their revenues over the same period if the US completely bans semiconductor companies from selling to Chinese customers.

The measures have already prompted chip equipment maker Applied Materials to cut fourth-quarter estimates for net sales by approximately $400 million. Q4 non-GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) adjusted diluted EPS (Earnings per Share) is expected to range from $1.54 to $1.78, compared to the prior range of $1.82 to $2.18.

While the restrictions are limited to next-generation chips now, NVIDIA, the largest US chipmaker by market value, warned in August that new licensing requirement on advanced chip shipments to China could cost the firm as much as $400 million in quarterly sales.

“There’s certainly a chance this could have a much bigger waterfall effect but I think these companies have already looked at the situation, they’re assessing it,” said Daniel Newman, Founding Partner and Principal Analyst at Futurum Research. “I’m not overly alarmed that it’s going to be the whole portfolio [of chips]... I think this is about leading the arms race for the next generation of technology in areas like supercomputing, high-performance computing, and artificial intelligence.”

Containing technology 'where they need to be'

Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has reiterated as much, highlighting in a recent address at Stanford University, that only “a small number of countries” are manufacturing or making tools to manufacture the highest-end semiconductors.

“We want to make sure that we keep those where they need to be,” Blinken said, without singling out China.

But Goujon argues that US firms, particularly equipment makers, face the risk of losing market share and revenue to competitors in countries that have historically had friendlier relations with the US, including Japan and South Korea. If companies there find a workaround for the Biden administration’s measures, Goujon said the new controls could end up backfiring on the US

“Foreign competitors to US [equipment makers] have an opportunity here, of course, to try to capture more market share in China if they can displace US persons and US linkages, which is possible in some areas,” she said.

“The US is applying heavy bilateral and plurilateral pressure for partners to follow its lead, and it's sending the signal that look, This package contains extraterritorial measures and we will add more if needed. But here's the window to try to basically align with our controls. So that's really going to be an important question now.”

www.cnn.com/2022/10/18/tech/us-chip-manufacturing-semicon...

The US is spending billions to boost chip manufacturing. Will it be enough?

United States does not currently have the same talent and supply chain pipeline as some Asian markets do to support a robust homegrown industry.

... the shortcomings are real. "When it comes to foundries, which are the manufacturing side of semiconductors, the U.S. has not really been a major player for many, many years," said Columbia Business School professor Dan Wang. While it very much used to be, manufacturing began migrating to Asia during the 1980s and '90s, Wang said. "One of the big reasons for this is that the cost of labor is lower, and it's just far cheaper to produce at a very massive scale, integrated circuits and chips, in those parts of the world," Wang added. Morris Chang, the founder of TSMC, said that it costs 50% more to manufacture chips in the U.S. than in Taiwan.

Now, simply having the facilities already set up to produce or expand chip manufacturing gives Asia a big advantage.

Moreover, the manufacturing of semiconductors requires a range of specialized inputs, including pure chemicals such as fluorinated polyimide, and etching gas, chip etching machines, and more. In places like Taiwan and Fukuoka, Japan, supply chains have developed where the providers of these products are located close to the semiconductor factories. There are also one or two companies that produce vital inputs and that have been trustworthy suppliers to companies in Asia for a long time. This is not yet the case in places like Arizona and Ohio, where plans to build massive chip manufacturing plants are already underway.

You also need a labor force willing and able to do the work.

In the United States, there is both a shortage of new graduates and experienced workers with the technical and engineering knowledge necessary to manufacture semiconductors.

"If we were to today, snap our fingers and have ten new fabs with the world's leading chips, we probably wouldn't have enough people to staff them," Scott Kennedy, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said. "That's the biggest bottleneck to the expansion of America's fab capacity, not capital."

Intel has tried to establish close relations with Arizona State University to recruit engineers, but it is unclear whether it and other companies building fabs in America will be able to hire enough trained engineers and technicians. If not, even the billions of dollars committed by the private and public sector may not be enough to reshore semiconductor manufacturing.

www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/10/23/engineer-sho...

Economic future of U.S. depends on making engineering cool

Purdue University races to expand semiconductor education to fill yawning workforce gap that threatens reshoring effort

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — On a recent afternoon, an unusual group of visitors peered through a window at Purdue University students tinkering in a lab: two dozen executives from the world’s biggest semiconductor companies.

The tech leaders had traveled to the small-town campus on the Wabash River to fix one of the biggest problems that they — and the U.S. economy — face: a desperate shortage of engineers.

Leading the visitors on a tour of the high-tech lab, Engineering Professor Zhihong Chen mentioned that Purdue could really use some donated chip-making equipment as it scrambles to expand semiconductor education.

“Okay, done. We can do that,” Intel manufacturing chief Keyvan Esfarjani quickly replied. Just weeks before, his company broke ground on two massive chip factories in Ohio that aim to employ 3,000 people.

By some estimates, the United States needs at least 50,000 new semiconductor engineers over the next five years to staff all of the new factories and research labs that companies have said they plan to build with subsidies from the Chips and Science Act, a number far exceeding current graduation rates nationwide, according to Purdue.

“This is recurrently one of the top, if not the number one, long-term concerns that [chip companies] have,” Mung Chiang, Purdue’s president-elect and former engineering dean, said in an interview.

Chip companies aren’t alone in worrying about the problem — or in looking to Purdue, one of the country’s biggest engineering schools, for answers. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who is overseeing the chip subsidies program, visited campus last month to hear about the courses and labs Purdue is adding to rapidly expand semiconductor education. Several Defense Department officials also have traveled lately to Purdue, located halfway between Chicago and Indianapolis, to discuss workforce training.

Engineer shortages have long plagued the U.S. tech sector, with Google, Apple and others complaining that immigration restrictions made it difficult to find employees. They’ve spent years pushing for an expansion of the H1B visa program for highly skilled foreign workers, to little avail.

As more production migrated to Asia, fewer U.S. students studied semiconductor engineering. At the same time, the rise of social media and other software-focused companies shifted more students to those sectors, where starting salaries were often higher than in the chip business, engineers say.

By rapidly expanding chip education, Purdue is aiming to graduate 1,000 semiconductor engineers annually as soon as possible — up from perhaps 150 a year today

In 1988, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory installed the first totally new supercomputer operating system in 20 years on the Livermore Computer Center’s (LCC) Cray X MP/48. The new Network Livermore Timesharing System (NLTSS) replaced the old Livermore Timesharing System. Nearly five years in design and four years in implementation, NLTSS was a state-of-the-art distributed processing system, providing more efficient use both of the center’s powerful multiprocessor supercomputers and the researcher’s own enhanced workstation. A row of disk drives is seen here in front of the machine.

A view of the Cray X-MP 48 machine room at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. In 1988 the Lab installed the first totally new supercomputer operating system in 20 years on the Livermore Computer Center’s (LCC) Cray X MP/48. The new Network Livermore Timesharing System (NLTSS) replaced the old Livermore Timesharing System. Nearly five years in design and four years in implementation, NLTSS was a state-of-the-art distributed processing system, providing more efficient use both of the center’s powerful multiprocessor supercomputers and the researcher’s own enhanced workstation.

Dutch national supercomputer Huygens, an IBM pSeries 575 clustered SMP system.

The IBM system will be replaced by a new class of supercomputer, "Cartesius", provided and built by Bull.

About four months ago, the room was still clean and free of dust, now it has been contaminated, soiled and abused by construction workers ("bouwvarkens").

Read more about Huygens at Wikipedia and Stichting Nationale Computerfaciliteiten.

This photo was used in the article "Assessing the environmental impact of data centres part 1: Background, energy use and metrics" in the "Building and Environment" journal Volume 82, december 2014.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory unveiled Summit as the world’s most powerful and smartest scientific supercomputer on June 8, 2018.

With a peak performance of 200,000 trillion calculations per second—or 200 petaflops, Summit is eight times more powerful than ORNL’s previous top-ranked system, Titan. For certain scientific applications, Summit is also capable of more than three billion billion mixed-precision calculations per second, or 3.3 exaops. Summit provides unprecedented computing power for research in energy, advanced materials and artificial intelligence (AI), among other domains, enabling scientific discoveries that were previously impractical or impossible.

Learn more: www.olcf.ornl.gov/summit/

Credit: Genevieve Martin/ORNL

I’m Mike Papka, a computer scientist and big data enthusiast at Argonne National Laboratory, where I’m also the director of the Leadership Computing Facility - home to the world’s fifth-fastest supercomputer. AMA!

Check out Mike's AMA HERE »

Known as QCDOC machines, for quantum chromodynamics (QCD) on a chip, these supercomputers perform the complex calculations of the theory that describes the interactions of quarks and gluons and the force that holds atomic nuclei together.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory unveiled Summit as the world’s most powerful and smartest scientific supercomputer on June 8, 2018.

With a peak performance of 200,000 trillion calculations per second—or 200 petaflops, Summit will be eight times more powerful than ORNL’s previous top-ranked system, Titan. For certain scientific applications, Summit will also be capable of more than three billion billion mixed precision calculations per second, or 3.3 exaops. Summit will provide unprecedented computing power for research in energy, advanced materials and artificial intelligence (AI), among other domains, enabling scientific discoveries that were previously impractical or impossible.

Credit: Genevieve Martin/ORNL

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory unveiled Summit as the world’s most powerful and smartest scientific supercomputer on June 8, 2018.

With a peak performance of 200,000 trillion calculations per second—or 200 petaflops, Summit will be eight times more powerful than ORNL’s previous top-ranked system, Titan. For certain scientific applications, Summit will also be capable of more than three billion billion mixed precision calculations per second, or 3.3 exaops. Summit will provide unprecedented computing power for research in energy, advanced materials and artificial intelligence (AI), among other domains, enabling scientific discoveries that were previously impractical or impossible.

Credit: Genevieve Martin/ORNL

Computer science, math and physics students meet with faculty to talk about the super computer calculations.

Try to visualize a beautiful woman. Give it some seconds serious consideration. I shall wait patiently as long...

Now the woman you picture in you head, not only has form and shape, she most likely even have mannerisms and perhaps are wearing clothes. If so we can even with wisdom assume that the clothes she is wearing is consistent with, and thus reflect, the person she is and here is my point. She is to the mental effect almost a person, as your imagination is a VERY powerfull tool. - Mind you not even the Tihane-2 (The Chinese supercomputer) would be able to create in memory what you just did in seconds. (Further more, the Tihane-2 would probably answer that beauty is subjective and continue in long explanations to explain the beauty of binary simplicity, but be quite indifferent as in regard to the beauty of women.)

In your head, from the quest was launched, you started drawing upon your feminine resources of data in your eyes putting together a pretty much ”perfect” women ;o) But make no mistake, in a way she is VERY real, as she is created only and alone from YOUR subconscious imaginative spectrum of what a ”beautiful women” consist of. Those perceptions are not only VERY real, to you it is the whole world and thus, the very definition of beauty.

If you are a crossdresser, transvestite or transexual, you know very well what powers are to be drawn from within that imaginative spectrum, but make no mistake. When ordinary macho heterosexual men watch Expendables 1 (Macho hetero classic - 5 stars from my male side, Lisa says ”No comment!” shaking her head) they very much identify them self, with being amongst such group of battle scarred veterans, knowing each others weaknesses and strengths, using them in unison, like a team, working like clockwork and on backbone alone beating odds no sane person would bet a single dime on.

Women as well have their own visual identification spectrum and I stand accused making following statement without statistic documentation, but I have notion practically all women at some time, have imagined them self walking into a crowded room drawing all attention, dazzling everyone with the mere presence of their radiant beauty. But again, I might be mistaken and women not only may, but trust me will rightfully claim ”What the hell do I REALLY know about women.” and it is in fact quite true.

Never the less there is still much to be obtained from within, the almost magical imaginative spectrum.

You see, something happens to macho heterosexual men, watching not ONLY Expendables 1, but every film made in modern times that has to do with war, fighting, death, violence and murder (several times). Slowly, we find, such identification change such individuals. The same thing happens to T-girls who spend much time in the imaginative female spectrum, they change slowly, becoming more like that in reality as well, changing slowly.

Thus watching many movies on war identifying with being a vengeful warmachine, might actually in a stressfull situation, combined with a life crisis, trigger the hidden imaginative being nurtured by such imagination, making that person pick up a riffle going into warmode showing the world a thing or two. Where as a T-girl in same stressfull life crisis, very well might say ”Fuck it all.” pick up a pair of stilettos and wearing a tight skirt ”showing” (though in a more practical sense) the world a thing or two as well.

Dutch national supercomputer Huygens, an IBM pSeries 575 clustered SMP system.

Read more about Huygens at Wikipedia and Stichting Nationale Computerfaciliteiten.

Try to visualize a beautiful woman. Give it some seconds serious consideration. I shall wait patiently as long...

Now the woman you picture in you head, not only has form and shape, she most likely even have mannerisms and perhaps are wearing clothes. If so we can even with wisdom assume that the clothes she is wearing is consistent with, and thus reflect, the person she is and here is my point. She is to the mental effect almost a person, as your imagination is a VERY powerfull tool. - Mind you not even the Tihane-2 (The Chinese supercomputer) would be able to create in memory what you just did in seconds. (Further more, the Tihane-2 would probably answer that beauty is subjective and continue in long explanations to explain the beauty of binary simplicity, but be quite indifferent as in regard to the beauty of women.)

In your head, from the quest was launched, you started drawing upon your feminine resources of data in your eyes putting together a pretty much ”perfect” women ;o) But make no mistake, in a way she is VERY real, as she is created only and alone from YOUR subconscious imaginative spectrum of what a ”beautiful women” consist of. Those perceptions are not only VERY real, to you it is the whole world and thus, the very definition of beauty.

If you are a crossdresser, transvestite or transexual, you know very well what powers are to be drawn from within that imaginative spectrum, but make no mistake. When ordinary macho heterosexual men watch Expendables 1 (Macho hetero classic - 5 stars from my male side, Lisa says ”No comment!” shaking her head) they very much identify them self, with being amongst such group of battle scarred veterans, knowing each others weaknesses and strengths, using them in unison, like a team, working like clockwork and on backbone alone beating odds no sane person would bet a single dime on.

Women as well have their own visual identification spectrum and I stand accused making following statement without statistic documentation, but I have notion practically all women at some time, have imagined them self walking into a crowded room drawing all attention, dazzling everyone with the mere presence of their radiant beauty. But again, I might be mistaken and women not only may, but trust me will rightfully claim ”What the hell do I REALLY know about women.” and it is in fact quite true.

Never the less there is still much to be obtained from within, the almost magical imaginative spectrum.

You see, something happens to macho heterosexual men, watching not ONLY Expendables 1, but every film made in modern times that has to do with war, fighting, death, violence and murder (several times). Slowly, we find, such identification change such individuals. The same thing happens to T-girls who spend much time in the imaginative female spectrum, they change slowly, becoming more like that in reality as well, changing slowly.

Thus watching many movies on war identifying with being a vengeful warmachine, might actually in a stressfull situation, combined with a life crisis, trigger the hidden imaginative being nurtured by such imagination, making that person pick up a riffle going into warmode showing the world a thing or two. Where as a T-girl in same stressfull life crisis, very well might say ”Fuck it all.” pick up a pair of stilettos and wearing a tight skirt ”showing” (though in a more practical sense) the world a thing or two as well.

Try to visualize a beautiful woman. Give it some seconds serious consideration. I shall wait patiently as long...

Now the woman you picture in you head, not only has form and shape, she most likely even have mannerisms and perhaps are wearing clothes. If so we can even with wisdom assume that the clothes she is wearing is consistent with, and thus reflect, the person she is and here is my point. She is to the mental effect almost a person, as your imagination is a VERY powerfull tool. - Mind you not even the Tihane-2 (The Chinese supercomputer) would be able to create in memory what you just did in seconds. (Further more, the Tihane-2 would probably answer that beauty is subjective and continue in long explanations to explain the beauty of binary simplicity, but be quite indifferent as in regard to the beauty of women.)

In your head, from the quest was launched, you started drawing upon your feminine resources of data in your eyes putting together a pretty much ”perfect” women ;o) But make no mistake, in a way she is VERY real, as she is created only and alone from YOUR subconscious imaginative spectrum of what a ”beautiful women” consist of. Those perceptions are not only VERY real, to you it is the whole world and thus, the very definition of beauty.

If you are a crossdresser, transvestite or transexual, you know very well what powers are to be drawn from within that imaginative spectrum, but make no mistake. When ordinary macho heterosexual men watch Expendables 1 (Macho hetero classic - 5 stars from my male side, Lisa says ”No comment!” shaking her head) they very much identify them self, with being amongst such group of battle scarred veterans, knowing each others weaknesses and strengths, using them in unison, like a team, working like clockwork and on backbone alone beating odds no sane person would bet a single dime on.

Women as well have their own visual identification spectrum and I stand accused making following statement without statistic documentation, but I have notion practically all women at some time, have imagined them self walking into a crowded room drawing all attention, dazzling everyone with the mere presence of their radiant beauty. But again, I might be mistaken and women not only may, but trust me will rightfully claim ”What the hell do I REALLY know about women.” and it is in fact quite true.

Never the less there is still much to be obtained from within, the almost magical imaginative spectrum.

You see, something happens to macho heterosexual men, watching not ONLY Expendables 1, but every film made in modern times that has to do with war, fighting, death, violence and murder (several times). Slowly, we find, such identification change such individuals. The same thing happens to T-girls who spend much time in the imaginative female spectrum, they change slowly, becoming more like that in reality as well, changing slowly.

Thus watching many movies on war identifying with being a vengeful warmachine, might actually in a stressfull situation, combined with a life crisis, trigger the hidden imaginative being nurtured by such imagination, making that person pick up a riffle going into warmode showing the world a thing or two. Where as a T-girl in same stressfull life crisis, very well might say ”Fuck it all.” pick up a pair of stilettos and wearing a tight skirt ”showing” (though in a more practical sense) the world a thing or two as well.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory unveiled Summit as the world’s most powerful and smartest scientific supercomputer on June 8, 2018.

With a peak performance of 200,000 trillion calculations per second—or 200 petaflops, Summit will be eight times more powerful than ORNL’s previous top-ranked system, Titan. For certain scientific applications, Summit will also be capable of more than three billion billion mixed precision calculations per second, or 3.3 exaops. Summit will provide unprecedented computing power for research in energy, advanced materials and artificial intelligence (AI), among other domains, enabling scientific discoveries that were previously impractical or impossible.

Credit: Genevieve Martin/ORNL

Reconstructions of the path and damage caused by the asteroid that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, in Feb. 15, 2013, provide information about the origin, trajectory and power of the airburst. These details, published in a pair of papers in Nature, may help to refine theoretical models about the likely frequency of such events and potential damage that could be caused.

This 3D simulation of the Chelyabinsk meteor explosion by Mark Boslough was rendered by Brad Carvey using the CTH code on Sandia National Laboratories' Red Sky supercomputer. Andrea Carvey composited the wireframe tail. Photo by Olga Kruglova.

youtu.be/rSSgM94sSxQ

Starring Richard Egan, Constance Dowling, Herbert Marshall, John Wengraf, Philip Van Zandt, and William Schallert. Directed by Herbert L. Strock.

When two scientists at a top-secret government installation devoted to space research are killed -- in their own test chamber, seemingly by an experiment gone awry -- Dr. David Sheppard (Richard Egan) is sent out from Washington to investigate. Sheppard mixes easily enough with the somewhat eccentric team of scientists, though he always seems in danger of being distracted by the presence of Joanne Merritt (Constance Dowling), who serves as the aide to the project director Dr. Van Ness (Herbert Marshall) but is, in reality, another security agent. Sheppard is as puzzled as anyone else by the seemingly inexplicable series of events overtaking the installation -- properly operating equipment suddenly undergoing lethal malfunctions, and the radar tracking aircraft that aren't there -- until he puts it together with the operations of NOVAC (Nuclear Operated Variable Automatic Computer), the central brain of the complex. But the mystery deepens when he discovers that NOVAC was shut down during one of the "accidents" -- and even the computer's operators can't account fully for the whereabouts of GOG and MAGOG, the two robots under the computer's control.

"...and then without warning, the machine became a frankenstein of steel," says the sensationalist poster text. This is the third story in Ivan Tors' OSI trilogy. His first "Office of Scientific Investigation" story was Magnetic Monster in early 1953. The second was Riders to the Stars in early '54. With Gog the loose trilogy is complete. Unlike the Star Wars trilogy in which the stories build upon each other, each of the three OSI stories are separate tales which have nothing to do with each other. The common thread is the idea of there being a sort of Science FBI agency whose job it is, is to check out the scientifically strange. In that regard, Tors' OSI is a bit like a foreshadowing of the X-Files TV series, but without any of the New Age paranormal focus.

In keeping with the previous two stories, Gog is more of a detective murder mystery movie. Tors was a huge fan of "hard" science, not fanciful fiction fluff, so Gog, like the other two movies, is chock full of reveling in sciencey stuff in an almost geeky way. This reverence for real science keeps things from getting out on shaky limb, as many sci-fi films to. The events are much more plausible, less fantastic.

Synopsis

At a secret underground research facility, far out in the desert, scientists working on preparations for a manned space mission, are getting murdered mysteriously. Two agents from the OSI are dispatched to solve the mystery and keep the super secret space station program on track. The scientists are killed in various ways, mostly through equipment malfunctions. The facility director and the agents suspect sabotage. Small transmitter/receiver boxes are found within equipment in different parts of the facility. They suggest that someone on the outside is transmitting in the "malfunctions" in order to kill off the program's scientists. Occasional alarms indicate some flying high intruder, but nothing is clearly found. One of the base's two robots, named Gog, kills another technician while it's mate, Magog, tries to set up an overload within the base's atomic pile. The OSI agents stop Magog with a flame thrower. Meanwhile, interceptor jets scramble and find the highflying spy jet and destroy it with missiles. Once the trouble is past, the Director announces that they will be launching their prototype space station the next day, despite the sabotage attempts to stop it. The End.

The time spent reveling in techno-geekery has a certain Popular Science charm to it. There's an evident gee-whiz air about space and defense sciences which is fun to see. People were fascinated with things rockety and atomic. For various fun bits, see the Notes section.

Gog oozes Cold War from every frame. First is the base's underground location to make them safe from A-bombs. Next is the mysterious killer trying to stop the space station program. The high-flying mystery plane is "not one of ours." (that leaves: Them, and we all knew who they were.) The space station is to be powered by a solar mirror. Even that benign mirror has sinister possibilities. While demonstrating the mirror, the scientists use it to burn a model of a city. "This could happen...if we're not the first to reach space," says the Director. Space is the next "high ground" to be contested. At the end of the movie, when discussing the launch (despite the sabotage attempt) of the prototype space station, the Director says, "Through it's eye, we'll be able to see everything that goes on upon this tired old earth." The Defense Secretary says, "Nothing will take us by surprise again." An obvious reference to Pearl Harbor.

B-films often re-used props and sets from prior films in order to save on their budgets. Gog, even though shot in Eastman Color, was no exception. Two old prop friends show up in Gog. One is our venerable old friend, the space suits from Destination Moon ('50). Look for the centrifuge scene. The research assistants are dressed in them, and as an added bonus, they wear the all-acrylic fish bowl helmets used in Abbot and Costello Go to Mars ('53). Our second old friend is scene in the radar / security room, (the one with the annoying tuning fork device). Check out the monitor wall. It's been gussied up a bit, but it is the spaceship control panel wall from Catwomen of the Moon and Project Moon Base -- complete with the empty 16mm film reels on the right side. It's fun to see old friends.

B-films often include stock footage of military units, tanks, jets, battleships, etc. to fill things out. Gog is no different, and even commits the common continuity error of showing one type of plane taking off, but a different kind in the air.

What amounts to a small treat amid the usual stock footage of jets, some shots of a rather obscure bit of USAF hardware -- the F-94C Starfire with its straight wings and huge wing tanks. In 1954, the Starfire was one of America's coolest combat jets, yet we hear little about it. The swept-wing F-86 Sabers (which we see taxiing and taking off) were the agile fighter which gained fame over Korea. They're common stock footage stars. The F-94, with its onboard radar (in the nose cone) was deemed too advanced to risk falling into enemy hands. So, it didn't see much action , and therefore little fame. The heavier, yet powerful F-94C (one of the first US jets to have an afterburner) was 1954 America's hottest Interceptor -- designed to stop high flying Soviet bombers. It's blatant cameo appearance in Gog, intercepting the high-flying mystery plane, was a fun little bit of patriotic showing off.

The very name of the movie, Gog, is charged with meaning to American audiences of the mid 50s, though virtually lost on viewers of the 21st century. The names of the two robots, Gog and Magog, come from the Bible. More specifically, from the prophecies of Ezekiel (Chapter 38) and the Book of Revelation (chapter 20). While just who they are (nations? kings?) has been debated for centuries, their role as tools of Satan in the battle of Armageddon is clear. Mainstream American patriotic Christendom had settled on the idea that the Soviet Union was the prophesied "nations from the north" who would join Satan to oppose God. This gives the title of the movie a special Cold War significance. It also puts an interesting spin on the Dr. Zeitman character for having named the two robots in the first place. Since they were tools of the mega-computer NOVAC, what was he saying about NOVAC?

It is interesting that the base's radar could not detect the mystery plane (which was beaming in the 'kill' instructions to NOVAC) because it was made of "fiberglass" which rendered it invisible to radar. Now, fiberglass itself isn't sturdy enough for high-speed jets, and it would take until the 1990s before composite materials advanced to make the dream of a stealth aircraft a reality. Nonetheless, the dream (or nightmare) of stealth aircraft was on-screen in 1954 in Gog.

The super computer, NOVAC, controlled everything on the base. Even though the machines were not really killing scientists on their own, but following human orders from the mystery plane, there was the on-screen depiction of machines having a murderous mind of their own. (all pre-Steven King) In the techno starry-eyed 50s, it was fairly uncommon for the technology itself to be turning on its masters. This idea would gain traction later in the 50s, and especially in the 60s, but in '54, it was unusual.

A cautionary subtext to Gog is the danger of trusting in a supercomputer to manage defenses and a whole base. NOVAC doesn't go bad on its own, as the computer will in The Invisible Boy, Hal in 2001 or Colossus in The Forbin Project. In this movie, it was the nefarious "others" who hacked into NOVAC to make it do the killing, but this just demonstrates the danger. People were getting a little nervous about letting machines take over too much responsibility. We were starting to distrust our creations.

Until Gog, robots were fairly humanoid.

They had two legs, two arms, a torso and a head. Audiences had seen the mechanical Maria in Metropolis ('27), the fedora-wearing metal men in Gene Autrey's Phantom Empire serial ('35). The water-heater-like Republic robot appeared in several rocketman serials. There was the gleaming giant Gort in The Day the Earth Stood Still ('51) and the cute left over fedora-dudes in Captain Video ('51). The metal giant in Devil Girl from Mars ('54) was also humaniod, in a chunky way. Gog and Magog were a departure from the stereotype. They were noticeably in-human, which was part of the mood.

Bottom line? Gog seems a bit bland, as far as sci-fi tends to go, but it has a lot in it for fans of 50s sci-fi.

Arsenal (Vienna)

The Vienna Arsenal, object 1

(Pictures you can see by clicking on the link at the end of page!)

The Arsenal in Vienna is a former military complex in the southeast of the city, in the 3rd District of Vienna located. The mighty, consisting of several brick buildings facility is located on a rectangular plan on a hill south of the country Strasser belt (Landstraßer Gürtel).

Meaning

The Arsenal is the most important secular assembly of Romantic Historicism in Vienna and was conducted in Italian-Medieval and Byzantine-Moorish forms. Essentially the system is preserved in its original forms; only the former workshop buildings within the bounding, from the the outside visible wings were replaced by new constructions.

History to 1945

Bird's eye view of the complex, arsenal, lithography Alexander Kaiser, 1855

Vienna Arsenal (Museum of Military History)

Arsenal, with HGM (Heeresgeschichtliches Museum) from the East

The plant, with a total of 31 "objects" (buildings) was built from 1849 to 1856 on the occasion of the March Revolution of 1848 and was the first building of the fortress triangle, the old Vienna's city walls replacing, with the Rossauerstrasse Barracks and the now-defunct Franz Joseph barracks at Stubenring. These buildings should not serve to deter foreign enemies from the city, but to secure state power in the event of revolutionary upheavals in Vienna. The decision to build the Arsenal, it came from the 19-year-old Emperor Franz Joseph I who on 2 December 1848 had come to the throne.

The design for the Imperial Artillery Arsenal came from General Artillery Director Vincenz Freiherr von Augustin, which, subsequently, the site management had been transferred. Under his leadership, the buildings under allocation of sectors have been planned of the architects Carl Roesner, Antonius Pius de Riegel, August Sicard von Sicardsburg, Eduard van der Nüll, Theophil von Hansen and Ludwig Förster and built by the company of the architect Leopold Mayr.

From 1853 to 1856, Arsenal church was built by the architect Carl Roesner. The K.K. Court Weapon Museum, later K.K. Army Museum, now Museum of Military History, housed in a separate representative free-standing wing, was completed structurally in 1856, but was only in 1869 for the first time accessible.

For the construction of the Arsenal 177 million bricks were used. Construction costs totaled $ 8.5 million guilders. In the following years, there have been extensions. During the two world wars, the complex served as a weapons factory and arsenal, especially as barracks.

The record number of employees in Arsenal was reached in the First World War, with around 20,000 staffers. After 1918, the military-industrial operation with own steel mill was transformed into a public service institution with the name "Austrian art arsenal". However, there were almost insoluble conversion problems in the transition to peacetime production, the product range was too great and the mismanagement considerable. The number of employees declined steadily, and the company became one of the great economic scandals of the First Republic.

By the fall of 1938, the area belonged to the 10th District Favoriten. However, as was established during the "Third Reich" the Reich District of Greater Vienna the arsenal complex and the south-east of it lying areas in the wake of district boundary changes became parts of the 3rd District.

During the Second World War, in the Arsenal tank repair workshops of the Waffen-SS were set up. In the last two years of the war several buildings were severely damaged by bombing. During the Battle of Vienna, in the days of 7 to 9 April 1945, was the arsenal, defended by the 3rd SS Panzer Division "Totenkopf", focus of the fighting, the Red Army before their victory recording heavy losses.

History since 1945

Ruins of the object 15 after the air raids 1944

Deposits at the Arsenal Street

After heavy bomb damages during the Second World War, the buildings of the Arsenal were largely restored to their original forms.

In the southern part and in the former courtyard of the arsenal several new buildings were added, among them 1959-1963 the decoration workshops of the Federal Theatre designed by the architects Erich Boltenstern and Robert Weinlich. From 1961 to 1963, the telecommunications central office was built by the architect Fritz Pfeffer. From 1973 to 1975 were built plant and office building of the Post and Telephone Head Office for Vienna, Lower Austria and Burgenland (now Technology Centre Arsenal of Telekom Austria) with the 150-foot radio tower in Vienna Arsenal according to the plans of architect Kurt Eckel. In the 1990s, a rehearsal stage of the castle theater (Burgtheater) was built according to plans by Gustav Peichl.

Also the Austrian Research and Testing Centre Arsenal, now Arsenal Research, which has made itself wordwide a celebrity by one of the largest air chambers (now moved to Floridsdorf - 21st District ), was housed in the complex. A smaller part of the system is still used by the Austrian army as a barracks. Furthermore, the Central Institute for Disinfection of the City of Vienna and the Central Chemical Laboratory of the Federal Monuments Office are housed in the arsenal. The Military History Museum uses multiple objects as depots.

In one part of the area residential buildings were erected. The Arsenal is forming an own, two census tracts encompassing census district, which according to the census in 2001 2.058 inhabitants had.

End of 2003, the arsenal in connection with other properties of the Federal Property Society (BIG - Bundesimmobiliengesellschaft) was sold to a private investor group. Since early 2006, the lawyer of Baden (Lower Austria, not far away from Vienna) Rudolf Fries and industrialist Walter Scherb are majority owners of the 72,000 m2 historic site that they want to refurbish and according to possibility rent new. Fries also plans to enlarge the existing living space by more than half (about 40,000 m2).

An architectural design competition, whose jury on 28 and 29 in June 2007 met, provided proposals amounting to substantial structural changes in the system. Such designed competition winner Hohensinn a futuristic clouds clip modeled after El Lissitzky's cloud bracket, a multi-level horizontal structure on slender stilts over the old stock on the outskirts of the Swiss Garden. The realization of these plans is considered unlikely.

Some objects are since 2013 adapted for use by the Technical University of Vienna: Object 227, the so-called "Panzerhalle" will house laboratories of the Institute for Powertrains and Automotive Technology. In object 221, the "Siemens hall", laboratories of the Institute for Energy Technology and Thermodynamics as well as of the Institute for Manufacturing Technology and High Power Laser Technology are built. In object 214 is besides the Technical Testing and Research Institute (TVFA) also the second expansion stage of the "Vienna Scientific Cluster" housed, of a supercomputer, which was built jointly by the Vienna University of Technology, the University of Vienna and the University of Agricultural Sciences.

Accessibility

The arsenal was historically especially over the Landstraßer Gürtel developed. Today passes southeast in the immediate proximity the Südosttangente called motorway A23 with it connection Gürtel/Landstraßer Hauptstrasse. Southwest of the site runs the Eastern Railway, the new Vienna Central Station closes to the west of the arsenal. Two new bridges over the Eastern Railway, the Arsenal Stay Bridge and the Southern Railway bridge and an underpass as part of Ghegastraße and Alfred- Adler-Straße establish a connection to the on the other side of the railway facilities located Sonnwendviertel in the 10th District, which is being built on the former site of the freight train station Vienna South Station.

On the center side is between Arsenal and Landstraßer Gürtel the former Maria Josefa Park located, now known as Swiss Garden. Here stands at the Arsenalstraße the 21er Haus, a branch of the Austrian Gallery Belvedere, on the center-side edge of the Swiss Garden has the busy suburban main railway route the stop Vienna Quartier Belvedere, next to it the Wiener Linien D (tram) and 69A (bus) run.

de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsenal_(Wien)

Sebastian Buckup, Shinpei Kato, Nikolaus Lang, Angela Wang Nan speaking in the Supercomputers on Wheels session at the Annual Meeting of the New Champions 2023 in Tianjin, People's Republic of China, 28 June 2023. Tianjin Meijiang Convention Center - Room: Hub A. Copyright: World Economic Forum/Benedikt von Loebell

Cray XMP-24 Mainframe

Serial Number 115

The predecessor of this machine, serial number 102, became operational at the National Security Agency in June, 1983. Serial number 102 was the first XMP delivered by Cray to a customer site, and thus was arguably the most powerful supercomputer in the world at that time. It was a Cray XMP22, containing two processors and two meagewords (16 Megabytes) of main memory. The machine consists of three towers: a CPU (central processing unit) and main memory tower, an IOS tower (Input/Output Subsystem) and a SSD tower (solid-state storage device, or extended memory.

In July, 1987, as part of an upgrade, the original mainframe and IOS were replaced. CPU serial number 115 is a Cray XMP24, containing two processors and four meagawords (32 megabytes) of main memory.

.... an overall performance rating of 420 Megaflops. The machine was retired in February, 1993.

The mainframe weighs 5900 pounds.

250 kVA of 60 cycle power was consumed by this machine.

Also see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray_X-MP

In comparison to modern CPU speeds, the X-MP had less than half of the raw power of Microsoft's Xbox console or less than 8% of an Intel Core 2 Duo E6700

i09_0214 152

Cray XMP-24 Mainframe

Serial Number 115

The predecessor of this machine, serial number 102, became operational at the National Security Agency in June, 1983. Serial number 102 was the first XMP delivered by Cray to a customer site, and thus was arguably the most powerful supercomputer in the world at that time. It was a Cray XMP22, containing two processors and two meagewords (16 Megabytes) of main memory. The machine consists of three towers: a CPU (central processing unit) and main memory tower, an IOS tower (Input/Output Subsystem) and a SSD tower (solid-state storage device, or extended memory.

In July, 1987, as part of an upgrade, the original mainframe and IOS were replaced. CPU serial number 115 is a Cray XMP24, containing two processors and four meagawords (32 megabytes) of main memory.

.... an overall performance rating of 420 Megaflops. The machine was retired in February, 1993.

The mainframe weighs 5900 pounds.

250 kVA of 60 cycle power was consumed by this machine.

Also see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray_X-MP

In comparison to modern CPU speeds, the X-MP had less than half of the raw power of Microsoft's Xbox console or less than 8% of an Intel Core 2 Duo E6700

i09_0214 153

Peter Littlewood, Director of Argonne National Laboratory, addresses the press flanked by industry and government partners.

31102D, Aurora Press Conference with ANL, Intel, and Cray

Photographer: Mark Lopez

Just one rack of the Blue Gene/Q supercomputer, seen here with its wiring and cooling tubes exposed, will rapidly perform complex tasks that would require 18 racks of the previous generation of IBM supercomputers.

Brookhaven’s Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN) and the Chemistry Department will use Blue Gene/Q to tease out new ways to put nanoscale materials to work. In particular, Blue Gene/Q will decode and map out the complex array of chemical reactions that can occur on a single nanoparticle with greater speed and precision than ever before.

youtu.be/rSSgM94sSxQ

Starring Richard Egan, Constance Dowling, Herbert Marshall, John Wengraf, Philip Van Zandt, and William Schallert. Directed by Herbert L. Strock.

When two scientists at a top-secret government installation devoted to space research are killed -- in their own test chamber, seemingly by an experiment gone awry -- Dr. David Sheppard (Richard Egan) is sent out from Washington to investigate. Sheppard mixes easily enough with the somewhat eccentric team of scientists, though he always seems in danger of being distracted by the presence of Joanne Merritt (Constance Dowling), who serves as the aide to the project director Dr. Van Ness (Herbert Marshall) but is, in reality, another security agent. Sheppard is as puzzled as anyone else by the seemingly inexplicable series of events overtaking the installation -- properly operating equipment suddenly undergoing lethal malfunctions, and the radar tracking aircraft that aren't there -- until he puts it together with the operations of NOVAC (Nuclear Operated Variable Automatic Computer), the central brain of the complex. But the mystery deepens when he discovers that NOVAC was shut down during one of the "accidents" -- and even the computer's operators can't account fully for the whereabouts of GOG and MAGOG, the two robots under the computer's control.

"...and then without warning, the machine became a frankenstein of steel," says the sensationalist poster text. This is the third story in Ivan Tors' OSI trilogy. His first "Office of Scientific Investigation" story was Magnetic Monster in early 1953. The second was Riders to the Stars in early '54. With Gog the loose trilogy is complete. Unlike the Star Wars trilogy in which the stories build upon each other, each of the three OSI stories are separate tales which have nothing to do with each other. The common thread is the idea of there being a sort of Science FBI agency whose job it is, is to check out the scientifically strange. In that regard, Tors' OSI is a bit like a foreshadowing of the X-Files TV series, but without any of the New Age paranormal focus.

In keeping with the previous two stories, Gog is more of a detective murder mystery movie. Tors was a huge fan of "hard" science, not fanciful fiction fluff, so Gog, like the other two movies, is chock full of reveling in sciencey stuff in an almost geeky way. This reverence for real science keeps things from getting out on shaky limb, as many sci-fi films to. The events are much more plausible, less fantastic.

Synopsis

At a secret underground research facility, far out in the desert, scientists working on preparations for a manned space mission, are getting murdered mysteriously. Two agents from the OSI are dispatched to solve the mystery and keep the super secret space station program on track. The scientists are killed in various ways, mostly through equipment malfunctions. The facility director and the agents suspect sabotage. Small transmitter/receiver boxes are found within equipment in different parts of the facility. They suggest that someone on the outside is transmitting in the "malfunctions" in order to kill off the program's scientists. Occasional alarms indicate some flying high intruder, but nothing is clearly found. One of the base's two robots, named Gog, kills another technician while it's mate, Magog, tries to set up an overload within the base's atomic pile. The OSI agents stop Magog with a flame thrower. Meanwhile, interceptor jets scramble and find the highflying spy jet and destroy it with missiles. Once the trouble is past, the Director announces that they will be launching their prototype space station the next day, despite the sabotage attempts to stop it. The End.

The time spent reveling in techno-geekery has a certain Popular Science charm to it. There's an evident gee-whiz air about space and defense sciences which is fun to see. People were fascinated with things rockety and atomic. For various fun bits, see the Notes section.

Gog oozes Cold War from every frame. First is the base's underground location to make them safe from A-bombs. Next is the mysterious killer trying to stop the space station program. The high-flying mystery plane is "not one of ours." (that leaves: Them, and we all knew who they were.) The space station is to be powered by a solar mirror. Even that benign mirror has sinister possibilities. While demonstrating the mirror, the scientists use it to burn a model of a city. "This could happen...if we're not the first to reach space," says the Director. Space is the next "high ground" to be contested. At the end of the movie, when discussing the launch (despite the sabotage attempt) of the prototype space station, the Director says, "Through it's eye, we'll be able to see everything that goes on upon this tired old earth." The Defense Secretary says, "Nothing will take us by surprise again." An obvious reference to Pearl Harbor.

B-films often re-used props and sets from prior films in order to save on their budgets. Gog, even though shot in Eastman Color, was no exception. Two old prop friends show up in Gog. One is our venerable old friend, the space suits from Destination Moon ('50). Look for the centrifuge scene. The research assistants are dressed in them, and as an added bonus, they wear the all-acrylic fish bowl helmets used in Abbot and Costello Go to Mars ('53). Our second old friend is scene in the radar / security room, (the one with the annoying tuning fork device). Check out the monitor wall. It's been gussied up a bit, but it is the spaceship control panel wall from Catwomen of the Moon and Project Moon Base -- complete with the empty 16mm film reels on the right side. It's fun to see old friends.

B-films often include stock footage of military units, tanks, jets, battleships, etc. to fill things out. Gog is no different, and even commits the common continuity error of showing one type of plane taking off, but a different kind in the air.

What amounts to a small treat amid the usual stock footage of jets, some shots of a rather obscure bit of USAF hardware -- the F-94C Starfire with its straight wings and huge wing tanks. In 1954, the Starfire was one of America's coolest combat jets, yet we hear little about it. The swept-wing F-86 Sabers (which we see taxiing and taking off) were the agile fighter which gained fame over Korea. They're common stock footage stars. The F-94, with its onboard radar (in the nose cone) was deemed too advanced to risk falling into enemy hands. So, it didn't see much action , and therefore little fame. The heavier, yet powerful F-94C (one of the first US jets to have an afterburner) was 1954 America's hottest Interceptor -- designed to stop high flying Soviet bombers. It's blatant cameo appearance in Gog, intercepting the high-flying mystery plane, was a fun little bit of patriotic showing off.

The very name of the movie, Gog, is charged with meaning to American audiences of the mid 50s, though virtually lost on viewers of the 21st century. The names of the two robots, Gog and Magog, come from the Bible. More specifically, from the prophecies of Ezekiel (Chapter 38) and the Book of Revelation (chapter 20). While just who they are (nations? kings?) has been debated for centuries, their role as tools of Satan in the battle of Armageddon is clear. Mainstream American patriotic Christendom had settled on the idea that the Soviet Union was the prophesied "nations from the north" who would join Satan to oppose God. This gives the title of the movie a special Cold War significance. It also puts an interesting spin on the Dr. Zeitman character for having named the two robots in the first place. Since they were tools of the mega-computer NOVAC, what was he saying about NOVAC?

It is interesting that the base's radar could not detect the mystery plane (which was beaming in the 'kill' instructions to NOVAC) because it was made of "fiberglass" which rendered it invisible to radar. Now, fiberglass itself isn't sturdy enough for high-speed jets, and it would take until the 1990s before composite materials advanced to make the dream of a stealth aircraft a reality. Nonetheless, the dream (or nightmare) of stealth aircraft was on-screen in 1954 in Gog.

The super computer, NOVAC, controlled everything on the base. Even though the machines were not really killing scientists on their own, but following human orders from the mystery plane, there was the on-screen depiction of machines having a murderous mind of their own. (all pre-Steven King) In the techno starry-eyed 50s, it was fairly uncommon for the technology itself to be turning on its masters. This idea would gain traction later in the 50s, and especially in the 60s, but in '54, it was unusual.

A cautionary subtext to Gog is the danger of trusting in a supercomputer to manage defenses and a whole base. NOVAC doesn't go bad on its own, as the computer will in The Invisible Boy, Hal in 2001 or Colossus in The Forbin Project. In this movie, it was the nefarious "others" who hacked into NOVAC to make it do the killing, but this just demonstrates the danger. People were getting a little nervous about letting machines take over too much responsibility. We were starting to distrust our creations.

Until Gog, robots were fairly humanoid.

They had two legs, two arms, a torso and a head. Audiences had seen the mechanical Maria in Metropolis ('27), the fedora-wearing metal men in Gene Autrey's Phantom Empire serial ('35). The water-heater-like Republic robot appeared in several rocketman serials. There was the gleaming giant Gort in The Day the Earth Stood Still ('51) and the cute left over fedora-dudes in Captain Video ('51). The metal giant in Devil Girl from Mars ('54) was also humaniod, in a chunky way. Gog and Magog were a departure from the stereotype. They were noticeably in-human, which was part of the mood.

Bottom line? Gog seems a bit bland, as far as sci-fi tends to go, but it has a lot in it for fans of 50s sci-fi.

Sebastian Buckup, Shinpei Kato, Nikolaus Lang, Angela Wang Nan speaking in the Supercomputers on Wheels session at the Annual Meeting of the New Champions 2023 in Tianjin, People's Republic of China, 28 June 2023. Tianjin Meijiang Convention Center - Room: Hub A. Copyright: World Economic Forum/Benedikt von Loebell

Part of the new Dutch petascale national supercomputer, "Cartesius", provided and built by Bull.

Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything (42). In the first novel and radio series, a group of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings demand to learn the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything from the supercomputer, Deep Thought, specially built for this purpose. It takes Deep Thought 7½ million years to compute and check the answer, which turns out to be 42. The Ultimate Question itself is unknown. When asked to produce The Ultimate Question, Deep Thought says that it cannot; however, it can help to design an even more powerful computer, the Earth, that can. The programmers then embark on a further ten-million-year program to discover The Ultimate Question. This new computer will incorporate living beings in the "computational matrix", with the pan-dimensional creators assuming the form of mice. The process is hindered after eight million years by the unexpected arrival on Earth of the Golgafrinchans and then is ruined completely, five minutes before completion, when the Earth is destroyed by the Vogons to make way for a new Hyperspace Bypass. This is later revealed to have been a ruse: the Vogons had been hired to destroy the Earth by a consortium of psychiatrists, led by Gag Halfrunt, who feared for the loss of their careers when the meaning of life became known. Lacking a real question, the mice decide not to go through the whole thing again and settle for the out-of-thin-air suggestion "How many roads must a man walk down?" from Bob Dylan's song "Blowin' in the Wind". At the end of the radio series (and television series, as well as the novel The Restaurant at the End of the Universe) Arthur Dent, having escaped the Earth's destruction, potentially has some of the computational matrix in his brain. He attempts to discover The Ultimate Question by extracting it from his brainwave patterns, as abusively suggested by Ford Prefect, when a Scrabble-playing caveman spells out forty two. Arthur pulls random letters from a bag, but only gets the sentence "What do you get if you multiply six by nine?" "Six by nine. Forty two." "That's it. That's all there is." "I always thought something was fundamentally wrong with the universe" Six times nine is, of course, fifty-four. The program on the "Earth computer" should have run correctly, but the unexpected arrival of the Golgafrinchans on prehistoric Earth caused input errors into the system—computing (because of the garbage in, garbage out rule) the wrong question—the question in Arthur's subconscious being invalid all along. Quoting Fit the Seventh of the radio series, on Christmas Eve, 1978: Narrator: There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened. Some readers subsequently noticed that 613 × 913 = 4213 (using base 13). Douglas Adams later joked about this observation, saying, "I may be a sorry case, but I don't write jokes in base 13." In Life, the Universe and Everything, Prak, a man who knows all that is true, confirms that 42 is indeed The Answer, and confirms that it is impossible for both The Answer and The Question to be known about in the same universe (compare the uncertainty principle) as they will cancel each other out and take the Universe with them to be replaced by something even more bizarre (as described in the first theory) and that it may have already happened (as described in the second). Though the question is never found, 42 is shown as the table number at which Arthur and his friends sit when they arrive at Milliways at the end of the radio series. Likewise, Mostly Harmless ends when Arthur stops at a street address identified by his cry of, "There, number 42!" and enters the club Beta, owned by Stavro Mueller (Stavromula Beta). Shortly after, the earth is destroyed in all existing incarnations. The number 42 Douglas Adams was asked many times why he chose the number 42. Many theories were proposed, including the fact that 42 is 101010 in binary code, the fact that light refracts off water by 42 degrees to create a rainbow, the fact that light requires 10−42 seconds to cross the diameter of a proton. Adams rejected them all. On November 3, 1993, he gave an answer on alt.fan.douglas-adams: The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought '42 will do'. I typed it out. End of story. Adams described his choice as 'a completely ordinary number, a number not just divisible by two but also six and seven. In fact it's the sort of number that you could without any fear introduce to your parents'. While 42 was a number with no hidden meaning, Adams explained in more detail in an interview with Iain Johnstone of BBC Radio 4 (recorded in 1998 though never broadcast) to celebrate the first radio broadcast's 20th anniversary. Having decided it should be a number, he tried to think what an "ordinary number" should be. He ruled out non-integers, then he remembered having worked as a "prop-borrower" for John Cleese on his Video Arts training videos. Cleese needed a funny number for the punchline to a sketch involving a bank teller (himself) and a customer (Tim Brooke-Taylor). Adams believed that the number that Cleese came up with was 42 and he decided to use it. Adams also had written a sketch for The Burkiss Way called "42 Logical Positivism Avenue", broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 12 January 1977[10] – 14 months before the Hitchhiker's Guide first broadcast "42" in fit the fourth, 29 March 1978. In January 2000, in response to a panelist's "Where does the number 42 come from?" on the radio show "Book Club" Adams explained that he was "on his way to work one morning, whilst still writing the scene, and was thinking about what the actual answer should be. He eventually decided that it should be something that made no sense whatsoever- a number, and a mundane one at that. And that is how he arrived at the number 42, completely at random." Stephen Fry, a friend of Adams, claims that Adams told him "exactly why 42", and that the reason is "fascinating, extraordinary and, when you think hard about it, completely obvious." However, Fry says that he has vowed not to tell anyone the secret, and that it must go with him to the grave. John Lloyd, Adams' collaborator on The Meaning of Liff and two Hitchhiker's fits, said that Douglas has called 42 "the funniest of the two-digit numbers." The number 42 also appears frequently in the work of Lewis Carroll, and some critics have suggested that this was an influence. Other purported Carroll influences include that Adams named the episodes of the original radio series of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy "fits", the word Carroll used to name the chapters of The Hunting of the Snark. There is the persistent tale that forty-two is actually Adams' tribute to the indefatigable paperback book, and is really the average number of lines on an average page of an average paperback book. On the Internet The number 42 and the phrase, "Life, the universe, and everything" have attained cult status on the Internet. "Life, the Universe, and Everything" is a common name for the off-topic section of an Internet forum and the phrase is invoked in similar ways to mean "anything at all". Many chatbots, when asked about the meaning of life, will answer "42". Several online calculators are also programmed with the Question. If you type the answer to life the universe and everything into Google (without quotes or capitalising the small words), the Google Calculator will give you 42, as will Wolfram's Computational Knowledge Engine. Similarly, if you type the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything into DuckDuckGo, the 0-click box will read "42".[19] In the online community Second Life, there is a section on a sim called "42nd Life." It is devoted to this concept in the book series, and several attempts at recreating Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, were made. In the OpenOffice.org software, if you type into any cell of a spreadsheet =ANTWORT("Das Leben, das Universum und der ganze Rest"), which means the answer to life, the universe and everything, the result is 42.[20] ISO/IEC 14519-2001/ IEEE Std 1003.5-1999, IEEE Standard for Information Technology - POSIX(R) Ada Language Interfaces - Part 1: Binding for System Application Program Interface (API) , uses the number '42' as the required return value from a process that terminates due to an unhandled exception. The Rationale says "the choice of the value 42 is arbitrary" and cites the Adams book as the source of the value. The random seed chosen to procedurally create the whole universe including all the regions, constellations, stars, planets, moons and mineral distribution of the online massively multi-player computer game EVE Online was chosen as 42 by its lead game designer in 2002. Cultural references The Allen Telescope Array, a radio telescope used by SETI, has 42 dishes in homage to the Answer. In the TV show Lost, 42 is the last of the mysterious numbers, 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, and 42. In an interview with Lostpedia, producer David Fury confirmed this was a reference to Hitchhiker's. The TV show The Kumars at No. 42 is so named because show creator Sanjeev Bhaskar is a Hitchhiker's fan.[24] The band Coldplay's album Viva la Vida includes a song called "42". When asked by Q magazine if the song's title was Hitchhiker's-related, Chris Martin said, "It is and it isn't." The band Level 42 chose its name in reference to the book. The episode "42" of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who was named in reference to the Answer. Writer Chris Chibnall acknowledged that "it's a playful title". Ken Jennings, defeated along with Brad Rutter in a Jeopardy match against IBM's Watson, writes that Watson's avatar which appeared on-screen for those games showed 42 "threads of thought," and that the number was chosen in reference to this meme.

Apple Mac Pro + 27" Thunderbolt Display + G-Drives

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory unveiled Summit as the world’s most powerful and smartest scientific supercomputer on June 8, 2018.

With a peak performance of 200,000 trillion calculations per second—or 200 petaflops, Summit will be eight times more powerful than ORNL’s previous top-ranked system, Titan. For certain scientific applications, Summit will also be capable of more than three billion billion mixed precision calculations per second, or 3.3 exaops. Summit will provide unprecedented computing power for research in energy, advanced materials and artificial intelligence (AI), among other domains, enabling scientific discoveries that were previously impractical or impossible.

Credit: Genevieve Martin/ORNL

Learn more: www.olcf.ornl.gov/summit/

Two rows of the “Discover” supercomputer at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) contain more than 4,000 computer processors. Discover has a total of nearly 15,000 processors. Credit: NASA/Pat Izzo To learn more about NCCS go to: www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/climate-sim-center.html ( www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/climate-sim-center.html ) NASA Goddard Space Flight Center is home to the nation's largest organization of combined scientists, engineers and technologists that build spacecraft, instruments and new technology to study the Earth, the sun, our solar system, and the universe.