Welcome to TekTalk with Psykout!

For those of you who don’t know me, which is likely most of you, I go by the moniker Psykout when I’m making the streets safe with my buds in the Lodge of the Wolf. I’m the resident tech savant for the team, if I do say so myself. I won’t be revealing all the secrets to be found in The Jagged Earth in Psykout’s Secrets, there’s too many of them even for an insomniac with lots of time on her hands and access to computing resources that literally defy belief.

And that’s not a bad place to start! So let’s dive right in!

FORTE

There are three supercomputers known to be active within Aurora City.  The supercomputer designated “FORTE” is operated under the auspices of the Tuarsahzi Tribe from the Tuarsahzi Embassy in the Lockeheart District of Aurora City. Its primary purpose is modeling and simulation to address issues of overall importance to the Tuarsahzi tribe.

Dry as dirt, right? Exciting to me though, since I get to put this baby through its paces on a regular basis! For those eyes perusing this forum with nefarious intent (you know who you are!), FORTE isn’t exactly inside the embassy. It’s called “disinformation” and you aren’t getting to FORTE through there, nice try.

FORTE provides high-level analysis and long-term projections of vast “data oceans” of unstructured or minimally structured data for the benefit of the Tuarsahzi Tribe. In this capacity, FORTE provides weather forecasting, long-term modeling of soil/wind erosion, dune migration, and resource conservation. FORTE is also integral to the operations of the team of Augments known as the Lodge of the Wolf. While deputized for official recognition, the Lodge of the Wolf’s over-riding concern is the safety and growth of the Tuarsahzi Tribe.

Still not exactly keeping you on the edge of your seat, right? Break it down like this: FORTE monitors the media for any mention of the Lodge, the Tuarsahzi, and several other key phrases. If you’ve seen, heard, or read anything involving us, then FORTE has too.

To aid the Lodge, FORTE is integrated with more standard computing resources available within the embassy and the Lodge HQ, including:

• housekeeping and maintenance,
• information management and retrieval,
• internal security including video, automated response, and threat analysis,
• and communications,

among other uses. Partnership agreements used to fund, build, program and maintain the estimated $111,000,000 supercomputer allow external agencies to time-share computing capabilities, typically on a temporary, ad-hoc basis.

Shameless Plug! Keep an eye out for more Psykout’s Secrets about the other two supercomputers and the SABER Initiative!

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS
Name/Designation: FORTE (CK1 Mk2)

Partners/Designers

• Prime Contractor:  Desert Wolf Enterprises (DWE)
• Facility Design/Build:  Jackson P. Catas Energetics (JPCE), John Little Defense Designs (JLDD)
• Installation:  Silicon Integration International, Inc. (SI3)
• Additional Funding:  Cup Pharmaceutical Research (CPR)
• Hardware/Software:  Glacier Freelance Research (GFree), Catalyst Computational (CatComp), Coherent Light (CL)

Processing Hardware (the good stuff!)

• 3468 GFree “Arctic” R.84 quantum core compute cells (QC3s)
• 10,402 CatComp “Harmony” M3 graphic-based acceleration cells (GACs)
• 650 gigabytes (GB) Coherent Light “Railgun” primary memory modules (PMMs)
• 175 GB Coherent Light “Vault” non-volatile memory modules (NvM2s)

Standard Compute Capacity

• 1.52 mixed-mode trinary resolutions per second (MTRS)
• Roughly equivalent to 129.73 petaFLOPS (floating point operations per sec) OR
  2.19 exaOPS (mixed precision operations per second)
• Estimated Peak Performance is 1.64 MTRS (~239 PFLOPS / 3.92 exaOPS)

Which means exactly what, do I hear from the back of the room? If the Top 500 list of supercomputers considered quantum computing a reality, my baby would rate in the top 5 in the entire world! Not including the classified, die-before-even-thinking-they-exist, super-puters, of course, so DON’T ASK!

Storage

• 45 petabytes (PB) primary storage @ 4.5 terabytes (TB) per second
• 32 PB secondary storage @ 3.1 TB per second

Put another way, Forte can transfer the entire contents of your garden variety storage drive before you finish this sentence.

Power and Cooling

• 19.7 megawatt (MW), 23MW capacity)
• Closed-loop liquid helium heat dissipation and energy transfer system

Filesystem

• Broadsword (Fractal Tesseract Engineering (FTE) )

THE END

So on to the quiz! Just kidding. More information than you looking for probably, but how can you not love this stuff? Keep an eye out for more Psykout’s Secrets. Most of them won’t be this technical, probably, promise!