Smart Clusters: Intelligence Is As Intelligence Does

"The following topic scares me for two reasons. First, maybe I read too many sci-fi novels about Artificial Intelligence (AI) going wrong (or right, we'll get to that in bit). Second, most HPC people are pragmatic individuals who deal with numbers and results that have a firm mathematical underpinning. Talking about AI as an HPC application is not quite a mainstream discussion.

"This week I will discuss some concerns and hopefully convince myself that Skynet is only in the movies. I'll also step out on limb and discuss what may become the a big application area for clusters. As a boy I was enamored by HAL 9000 in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey and now have a more pragmatic attitude that has been tempered over the years due to the AI hype of the past. We were supposed to have "it" all figured out by now.

"One of the missing pieces of AI has always been a good model or definition of intelligence. AI covers many areas of "intelligence", such as machine learning, optimization, natural language, planning, object recognition, etc. These areas are often called "Weak AI," or as I call it "helpful intelligence," exists in many applications used today."

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