The Gnostic Thread
The Anti-Christian Rush Toward Disembodiment
Four years ago, I was hired by my current employer to help build the world’s fastest supercomputer. A little over a year ago, we reached our goal of becoming the first “exascale” computer in world history—which means we built a machine that can do one quintillion arithmetic calculations per second. If the earth’s entire population started doing math calculations every second for 24 hours every day, it would take us around four years to do as many calculations as this machine can do in a single second.
There were hundreds, if not thousands of people working to build that system. My own role involved the building of software tools that can observe the interaction between applications and the system hardware to help ferret out ways that software can take more efficient advantage of the computational resources within the system. You can think of it as building tools that are sort of technological peeping Toms for math nerds.
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Keith Lowery works as a senior fellow at a major semiconductor manufacturer, where he does advanced software research. He worked in technology startups for over 20 years and for a while was a principal engineer at amazon.com. He currently serves as an elder at Lake Ridge Bible Church in a suburb of Dallas, Texas.
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