“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 baby up.”
The engineers retreated to their workstations behind a glass wall and placed noise-canceling headphones over their ears. The ambient buzz Ian had noted since entering the lab grew louder. A metallic clicking noise emanated from the machines, the cadence and volume increasing by the second, as if hundreds of steel dominoes were being shuffled and shuffled again.
“Would you prefer to watch the demonstration in a different manner?” asked Patel.
“Everest?” Ian struggled to keep from clapping his hands over his ears.
“Yes,” shouted Patel.
The men walked down a corridor to a smaller, quieter room. The room was empty except for one wall made entirely of dark translucent glass. This was Everest, the “exploratory visualization environment for science and technology,” a thirty-seven-megapixel stereoscopic wall made of eighteen individual display monitors.
Three vanguard codes had been selected to test Titan’s maximum operating capabilities. S3D modeled the molecular physics of combustion in an effort to lessen the carbon footprint of fossil fuels. WL-LSMS simulated the interaction between electrons and atoms in magnetic materials. And CAM-SE simulated specific climate change scenarios and was designed to cycle through five years of weather in one day of computing time.
“We’re running CAM-SE,” said Patel. “We might as well find out whether or not the earth is going to be here fifty years from now.”
“Might as well.” Frankly, Ian was more interested in whether Titan would be in working order fifty minutes from now or a flaming pile of silicon. He crossed his arms and faced the wall of black glass. Six closely spaced horizontal lines ran the length of the walclass="underline" red, yellow, orange, green, blue, and purple.
The room lights dimmed.
Phase One Initiated flashed in the upper left-hand corner. Titan had begun its work.
Below it a reading displayed the supercomputer’s internal temperature: 75° Fahrenheit.
The lines on the glass wall began wiggling, interweaving, dancing with one another as if bothered by a weak current. The temperature display jumped to 80°, then 85°. The lines’ movements grew more frenzied, each assuming a life of its own, oscillating into sine and cosine waves. The lines were a visual manifestation of Titan’s calculations as the machine worked its way into the complex code, analyzing billions of possible climate models. There were no longer just six lines but twenty, then thirty, and then too many to count, a rainbow of gyrating colors.
Meanwhile the temperature continued to rise.
A buzzer sounded.
Phase Two appeared.
Titan was working faster.
On command, the lines escaped their two-dimensional confines and leapt into the room. Ian and Patel were surrounded by a sea of multicolored, undulating wave functions, awash in an ocean of neon light.
120°
150°
The machine was heating too rapidly.
Ian said nothing. To speak was to scream. He glanced sidelong at Patel. The programmer no longer looked like an enthusiastic schoolboy. In the darkened room, his round, pleasant face illuminated by the wildly gyrating lights, he looked like a doomed prisoner awaiting a dreadful sentence.
170°
180°
Ian hummed to himself, blinking inadvertently each time the number rose. If Titan’s internal temperature surpassed 200° for a period of thirty seconds, the supercomputer would shut itself down. There would be no meeting at Fort Meade. The giant array in Utah would be removed and shipped back for repair. Months would be needed to rework the cooling design.
Despite his anxiety, Ian felt outside himself, part of some bigger scheme: intelligence, the universe, he didn’t know what to call it. Maybe progress. The first computers had used punch cards to tabulate election results. Then came transistors and silicon wafers and microchips. The latest was nanochips, chips as thin as a human hair, so small they needed to be viewed with an electron microscope. Today a smartphone retailing for $99 held the computing power necessary to launch Apollo 11 and land two men on the surface of the moon.
Titan possessed one billion times that power.
Deus in machina.
God in the machine.
Everest glowed blue.
The buzzer sounded again. The terrific noise grew.
Phase Three appeared.
Titan had reached its maximum speed. In a single second it performed as many calculations as the first mainframe had been able to perform in an entire week.
200°
“Shut it down,” shouted Patel. “We’re going to burn.”
“Wait,” said Ian.
It was all or nothing. Time to push the needle into the red.
Ten seconds passed. Fifteen.
“Ian…please. Shut it down.”
“Another second.”
“You must!”
And then something wonderful happened.
190°
The temperature decreased.
180°
And decreased again.
Patel grabbed Ian’s arm. Ian stood still, not protesting. The panel turned from blue to red. Patel began to laugh. “It works,” he said, though his words were impossible to hear above the clatter.
Ian nodded, saying nothing. His anxiety vanished. His calm returned. And his confidence, perhaps even greater than before.
“Of course it works,” he wanted to say. He had designed it.
13
In his short time in Austin, Joe had adopted Threadgill’s on North Lamar as his home away from home. The restaurant was a local landmark built inside the shell of an old service station and dressed up in fancy paint and neon lights. Mary regretted suggesting meeting there as soon as the words left her mouth, but Don Bennett had agreed so quickly, she hadn’t had the time to change her mind.
She found Bennett waiting inside, dressed in a three-piece suit, stiff as ever, seated at one of the booths and playing with the jukebox that decorated the table. “What are we listening to?” she asked as she slid onto the leather banquette.
“Elvis.” Bennett dropped a quarter in the slot and thumbed a button. Elvis Presley began singing “Hound Dog.” “Wanna eat?”
“You have time?” said Mary, surprised. “I thought you’d need to get out to the crime scene.”
“That’s shut down.”
“So you figured out what happened?”
“I already told you.”
“You didn’t seem so sure last night.”