[Discuss] Unix date beyond 2057

[Deryk Barker]

Thus spake John Blomfield (jabfield at shaw.ca):
...
> > That is an illustration of Eric Raymond's point that there is no 
> > conceivable
> > need for machines with word lengths larger than 64 bits so he predicts 
> > the
> > current transition from 32-bit to 64-bit that is going on is probably the
> > last such transition for the human race.  Normally, I pooh-pooh any such
> > conclusion about limits for computers because so many have been so wrong
> > about that before, but nevertheless, a 128-bit machine would have integer
> > ranges that are 2^{64} times larger than a current 64-bit machine, and it
> > really is hard to conceive of any practical software application that 
> > would
> > overflow such a huge integer range.
> >
> Such a machine is probably of interest to groups involved with the 
> mathematical modeling (numerical analysis) of complex physical systems 
> e.g. weather forecasting, climate models, aerodynamic fluid flow etc. 
> that are essentially solving initial value multi-dimensional 
> differential equations, stepping forward into time.  These models suffer 
> from rounding errors and the difficulty of predicting the propagation of 
> butterfly type events.  In these cases the more precision i.e. the more 
> bits per word the better.  Having said that this is normally the realm 
> of the big number crunching machines that are probably already 128 bit 
> (I'm a bit out of touch these days) and not the PC world.

A quick persual of the Top500 list shows that the ost powerful achine
in the world (as of last November), the IBM BlueGene/L, is built from
212992 PowerPC 440 CPUs - a 32-bit chip. The system has 73728 GB of
RAM. I want one!

-- 
|Deryk Barker, Computer Science Dept. | Music does not have to be understood|
|Camosun College, Victoria, BC, Canada| It has to be listened to.           |
|email: dbarker at camosun.bc.ca         |                                     |
|phone: +1 250 370 4452               |         Hermann Scherchen.          |