Free Invasion of Privacy by Christopher Reich Page A

the piece while doing a little background on Gordon May. “Right before the part about the race stewards denying his objection.”
    “He sounds serious.”
    “Like I said, he’s a sore loser. Now everyone knows it. Anything else about John Merriweather comes out of his mouth, we’ll sue him for defamation. Shut him up once and for all.”
    “That’s what I like to hear.”
    “To think,” said Ian, dismissing May’s monstrous accusations. “John Merriweather was a dear friend.”
    The men walked a ways farther, leaving the main campus and continuing along a paved road toward the R&D facility, a black glass rectangle the size of a city block surrounded by a twenty-foot-tall fence.
    “This is it, then?” said Briggs as they passed through the security checkpoint. “You get the cooling system all squared away?”
    “That’s what we’re going to find out.”
    “Better have,” said Briggs. “Utah’s ready to rock ’n’ roll. They don’t like delays in D.C.”
    Ian ignored the admonishing clip to his voice. “Let me worry about D.C.”
    “Whatever you say. You’re the boss.”
    —
    It was an object of beauty.
    Ian ran a hand over the face of the machine. An undulating wave of black titanium as alluring as a centerfold’s curves glimmered beneath the lab’s soft lighting. Form married to function. The ONE logo had been painted across the panels in electric-blue ink that seemed to lift right off them. The apotheosis of design and intellect.
    Titan. The world’s most powerful supercomputer.
    Half a dozen engineers were conducting last-minute checks of the equipment. All wore hoodies or fleece. One sported a down parka. Outside, the temperature was pushing 100°. Inside, it was a chill 58°.
    “Ah, Ian, welcome,” said Dev Patel, the chief programmer on the Titan project, hurrying toward him. “Can we get you a jumper?”
    “I’m fine,” said Ian. “Are we all hooked up?”
    “All according to your instructions.” Patel placed a hand on top of Titan. He was short and round, a native of Madras who’d come to ONE by way of IIT, Caltech, and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. “We’ve connected two hundred machines for today’s test. Our footprint is about four thousand square feet.”
    “Two hundred? That enough?”
    “Good lord, yes.” Patel tugged at the thatch of graying hair that fell across his forehead, looking like nothing so much as an aging schoolboy. “And then some.”
    Ian patted him on the back. John Merriweather’s coup was to marry graphics processing units (GPUs) with conventional central processing units (CPUs) to create a hybrid that was at once more energy-efficient than anything before it and capable of an order of magnitude increase in computational power. Titan used 25,000 AMD Opteron 16-core CPUs and 25,000 Nvidia Tesla GPUs. “Memory?”
    “Seven hundred ten terabytes,” said Patel, “with forty petabytes of hard drive storage.”
    Seven hundred ten terabytes was the equivalent of all the text found in a stack of books running from the earth to the moon. “And that gives us?”
    “A theoretical peak performance approaching ten exaflops—about twenty thousand trillion calculations per second—give or take.”
    “That means we’re tops, right?”
    “No one else is even close.”
    Ian spoke over his shoulder. “Get PR. I want that information out to everyone on the Net a minute after the test is completed.” He put a hand on Patel’s shoulder and guided him to a private corner. “Is she ready?”
    “I’ll keep my end of the bargain if you keep yours.”
    Ian’s end meant seeing to it that the new cooling system functioned as advertised. Patel’s end meant pushing Titan to the max, getting all twenty thousand trillion operations per second from it. It was time to push the needle into the red once more. “All right, then. Let’s light this baby up.”
    Patel’s eyes radiated excitement. He turned toward the engineers and raised his arms. “Light this