Dirty Little Secret

I'm in the industry, and I am not sure what "hack" means. The closest definition is to do something quickly in order to see results before attempting perfection.
"I'm going to hack this out so the customer can get us feedback today"

Hack has connotations to break into something as well.
"Im going to hack into the user account using the NSA backdoor, they left wide open"

A "hackathon" is when a bunch of people of like esoteric interests get together and talk, do, and share, usually around some technical issue.

Last weekend there was a hackathon over at MIT on the subject of GPUs. Don't stop reading. A GPU is nothing more than a computer that has several (1000s) of smaller computers inside.

Here is the dirty little computer secret. We can't make a single computer much faster, but we can put more and more computers in the same area as one computer. Basically every 2 years, we can double the number of computers in the same area. This is why your smart phone is called quad-core, it has actually 4 computers inside, each can work on something concurrently with the others. For people still using a flip phone, this is why every 2 years more people tease you.

The new GPUs have several applications. The most popular is gaming. Here is another little secret, the gaming world made 3D medical imaging possible. Just like porn made made the internet faster (its true), gaming made 3D medical imaging possible.

You can also use these computers to do things like guess passwords, oh and do useful work like analyze the image coming from your car's front facing camera in order to avoid a pedestrian. Or perhaps analyze the rear view image to see if the car behind you is going to hit you, so it can have your lawyer on speed dial.

I see a big future in having 100,000s of computers work on problem. Like many things in life, we are influenced by the early leaders (Alan Turing for example) but time marches on and new solutions appear that we should embrace.

The picture above is from the hackathon, and is a GPU simulating the collision of 1000 balls. Each ball gets a computer. Its the same computer that is in a Tesla car.

Big shout out to JM for being snowed in and going to the hack with me, and of course MIT for providing people/room/food.