Supercomputing in a Superhero World: Part Deux

Welcome to TekTalk with Psykout! Again!

For those of you who missed the first installment, 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. As with our first installment, let’s dive right in!

HYPATHIA

The supercomputer designated “HYPATHIA” is operated under the auspices of The Chalice Bureau (TCB) from their Three Diamonds Complex. Its primary purpose is supporting the activities of The Chalice Bureau, including rapid analysis of very large unstructured data sets, pre-critical mass trend identification, and future force projection. Secondary uses include support for Chalice United Productions for market analysis and Cup Pharmaceutical Research for medical, chemical, and genomic research. As the most publicly known supercomputing entity in Aurora City, The Chalice Bureau also has an on-going policy of evaluating unusual and/or public health related processing requests from individuals and institutions for use of HYPATHIA. Requests that have direct application to the public good have the greatest chance of being accepted while those addressing profitability for individual businesses or individuals are universally denied.

Yeah, it’s too many words, but sometimes the tech talk is the only way to provide a sense of scale. Since I’m so helpful, let me add some color. With this setup, TCB can process data feeds from anywhere and everywhere, slice and dice them 47 ways from Sunday, build 3D graphs and project logical extensions of the data and have them ready for your morning coffee (and lunch and dinner, etc.). So, lots of pretty, and informative, pictures for dataheads really fast and updated all the time.

HYPATHIA is also integral to the Augmented operations of The Chalice Bureau. TCB was the first legally recognized team of Augments within the United States of America, and currently the only one to be granted limited federal police power. Also, each member is deputized by the Aurora City Police Department for operations within Aurora City. HYPATHIA is used extensively for encryption and decryption functions to ensure secure communications to local and federal police entities, as well as information exchange with SWORD Station Aaron. Other functions include:

  • facilities management for all TCB facilities,
  • digital “housekeeping and maintenance”,
    information management, retrieval, correlation analysis, daily digests and situational analysis,
  • internal security including video, automated response, and threat analysis,
    and non-secure communications,

among other uses. Partnership agreements used to fund, build, program and maintain the estimated $138,000,000 supercomputer allow external agencies to time-share HYPATHIA’s computing capabilities. Law enforcement and security related requests are given priority with all others typically addressed on a temporary, ad-hoc basis (see the “Partners/Designers” section of the technical writeup below for more details).

Me again. Encryption is really important for everything from email to personal information. And if you happen to be one of the Augmented that doesn’t want to share everything about yourself on Twitter, much less expose your family to the masses, then encryption is very high on your list of priorities. Quantum computing to the rescue! Because HYPATHIA uses trinary resolutions, it can create encrypt/decrypt algorithms and keys that give regular binary computers a very, very bad case of indigestion. Quantcomps (I just now made that up…) can crunch the electrons into encrypted and decrypted shape orders of magnitude faster than their binary cousins.

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS
Name/Designation: HYPATHIA Mod4

Partners/Designers

  • Prime Contractor:         Chalice United Productions, Inc.
  • Facility Design/Build:  Jackson P. Catas Deep Space Research (JPC-DSR), John Little Defense Designs (JLDD)
  • Installation:                    Specialized Weaponry & Ordnance Research Directorate (SWORD), Silicon Integration International, Inc. (SI3)
  • Additional Funding:     Cup Pharmaceutical Research (CPR), Council for Advanced Development, Research and Experimentation (CADRE)
  • Hardware/Software:   Digital Intrusion Countermeasure Electronics (DICE), Glacier Freelance Research (GFR), Clarity Security & Investigations (CS&I), Coherent Light (CL)

Processing Hardware

  • 4582 GFree “Bering Strait” X.2i quantum core compute cells (QC3s)
  • 12,724 DICE “Snake-eyes” E1 holography-based acceleration cells (HACs)
  • 820 gigabytes (GB) Coherent Light “Holo” primary memory modules (PMMs)
  • 260 GB Coherent Light “Vault” non-volatile memory modules (NvM2s)

Standard Compute Capacity

  • 1.79 mixed-mode trinary resolutions per second (MTRS)
  •    Roughly equivalent to 236.99 petaFLOPS (floating point operations per sec) OR
  •    3.09 exaOPS (mixed precision operations per second)

Estimated Peak Performance

  • 2.11 MTRS (~364 PFLOPS / 5.88 exaOPS)

Much to my (current) dismay, this bad boy will process faster than my baby FORTE, but one they can afford it and two they’ve been at it longer and three I’m nowhere near done tuning up FORTE!

Storage

  • 50 petabytes (PB) primary storage @ 4.5 terabytes (TB) per second
  • 40 PB secondary storage @ 3.1 TB per second
  • 15 PB auxiliary storage @ 2.0 TB per second

Power and Cooling

  • 24.1 megawatt (MW), ~29MW capacity)
  • Primary Cooling: Actively regenerative enclosed nitrogen heat dissipation
  • Secondary Cooling: Passive geothermal heat leech and energy transfer

Filesystem

  • Claymore (Fractal Tesseract Engineering (FTE) )

Supercomputing in a World of Superheroes

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!

Continue reading “Supercomputing in a World of Superheroes”

Future Proofing

I love research. I love libraries. In a different time, I think I would have happily become a research librarian. Now my research is talking with people that have experience in areas I don’t and wading through websites. So many websites. It becomes very easy for me to spend hours researching a topic with only peripheral impact on a story. Enter the latest area of (likely too much) research: supercomputers.

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General Genre

Conventions

No, not the comic book kind, although they are a lot of fun. Genre conventions may or may not be a lot of fun. On the positive side, if you understand that the conventions for writing in the high fantasy genre are considerably different than cyberpunk, then genre conventions provide rails for the writing to run on. That’s also the negative side. Ignoring or defying genre conditions can be a make or break issue for a book. Prose comic books derive a lot of conventions from comic books in general, but the question before me as an author is whether or not to break with conventions – at least some of them – or color between the lines so to speak.

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Doppler Effect

Veiled Space contains multiple Story Worlds, each with their own personality and background. The Jagged Earth is the first to be explored in a published work, but I have notebooks of world-building information. Creating the ground rules for how the world functions on a fundamental level is very important for me to be able to write stories. This is especially true for science-fiction and fantasy where physics are regularly folded, spindled and mutilated, or just plain ignored, with a certain amount of impunity. Even there, however, my rules need to have a consistent logic and applicability for my characters to function.

So what in the world does the Doppler effect have to do with anything?

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Upcoming Anniversary

Anniversary

The one-year anniversary of Orchids Ablaze rolls around a few months from now. The second book will not be anywhere near ready by then. I can’t tell the story I want to, the way I want to, without taking more time than I originally thought (hoped!). I seem to experience that problem more and more as I get older: everything takes longer than anticipated. So, how should I celebrate that I did complete one book?

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