Can A Supercomputer Predict Revolutions?


Shades of Minority Report, anyone? Singularity Hub reports on the use of supercomputers to mine millions of news reports in order to more accurately predict political instability. It can’t quite read the future, yet, technically speaking.

I’ve got to say technically there, because so far it’s only been used for post-processing the reports on the Egyptian, Tunisian and Libyan revolutions. Still, it’s an impressive feat; an SGI Altix supercomputer with a whopping 1024 Intel Nehalem cores using 8.2 teraflops of processing power to sift through the world’s news databases to indicate significant changes in both sentiment of coverage as well as the geographic location of those reports. It’s still early days for the software solution, but it’s fascinating stuff; what would it point to if you fed it the news reports of today? [Singularity Hub]
Image: Argonne National Laboratory