• Austin America Statesman , Wednesday, November 19, 2008 10:45 AM

There's a video from a Sony/BMG conference in Rome about the exponential develop of technology -- and emerging nations -- that made its viral way to my email in box yesterday. Among the claims made: "By 2013, a supercomputer will be built that exceeds the computational capabilities of the human brain." The next slide asserts: "Predictions are that by 2049, a $1,000 computer will exceed the computational capabilities of the entire human species."

Dell CEO Michael Dell gave a speech yesterday outlining what he calls "the fourth wave" of computing, which will make very powerful systems available to a growing number of businesses.

Dell has built a "Hyperion" supercomputer in conjunction with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and several other companies that ultimately is expected to pump through 98 teraflops - or about 98,000,000,000,000 calculations per second. Researchers will use Hyperion to help advance hardware technologies, such as data storage and interconnections. But those groups also will work on new approaches to software, which often lags the advances in sheer processing power, Dan Zehr reports.

The implications for brand marketers? "If you can out-compute, you can out-compete," says Steve Conway, a high-performance-computing analyst at IDC.

Read the whole story at Austin America Statesman »