American Military Supercomputer Sets Speed Record
New York Times (06/09/08) P. C7; Markoff, John

An American military supercomputer created from components originally designed for video-game machines has passed the petaflop threshold by processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second. "This is equivalent to the four-minute mile of supercomputing," says University of Tennessee computer scientist Jack Dongarra. The Roadrunner is more than twice as fast as the previous fastest computer, the IBM BlueGene/L based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

Roadrunner cost $133 million to build and will be used primarily to solve classified military problems to ensure the nation's stockpile of nuclear weapons will continue to work correctly as they age. The simulations will examine the first fraction of a second during a weapons detonation. Before the supercomputer is placed in a classified environment it will be used to explore scientific problems such as climate change.

The Roadrunner is based on a radical design that uses 12,960 modified IBM Cell microprocessors, a chip originally created for Sony's PlayStation 3 video-game console. Roadrunner consumes roughly 3 megawatts of power and requires three different programming tools because it uses three types of processors. Programmers need to be able to keep all of the 116,640 processor cores in the machine simultaneously occupied so the computer runs efficiently. "Roadrunner tells us about what will happen in the next decade," says Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory director Horst Simon. "Technology is coming from the consumer electronics market and the innovation is happening first in terms of cell phones and embedded electronics."

A divided Supreme Court ruled today that it is unconstitutional to execute someone who rapes a child but does not kill the victim.

In a 5 to 4 decision, the court struck down a Louisiana law that had authorized the death penalty for anyone who rapes a child under the age of 12. Of 3,300 inmates on death row across the country, only two face capital punishment for a crime other than murder. Both were convicted under Louisiana's law, the broadest in the land. There has not been an execution for rape in the United States since 1964.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy joined the court's more liberal members in continuing the court's trend of narrowing the number of criminals eligible for death. He wrote that the harm caused a child who is raped is "grave,'' but "cannot be quantified in the same way as death of the victim.''

Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer joined the decision, which overturned the death penalty for Patrick Kennedy, 43, who was convicted of raping his 8-year-old stepdaughter in 1998--an assault so brutal that the girl required surgery. Kennedy has maintained his innocence.

Alito denounced the court's "sweeping conclusion'' that the death penalty is inappropriate "no matter how young the child, no matter how many times the child is raped, no matter how many children the perpetrator rapes, no matter how sadistic the crime, no matter how much physical or psychological trauma is inflicted and no matter how heinous the perpetrator's criminal record may be.''

NBC Resolves 'To Catch a Predator' Suicide Lawsuit

latimesblogs.latimes.com

NBC Universal has “amicably resolved” a $105-million lawsuit filed by a woman whose brother committed suicide during a taping of its controversial “Dateline NBC” series “To Catch a Predator,” both parties said today. Bruce Baron, an attorney for Patricia Conradt, said "“the matter has been amicably resolved to the satisfaction of both parties.”