Poor Mojo's Newswire

While the brutal Covenant juggernaut sweeps inexorably through space, intent on wiping out humankind, only one stronghold remains…the planet Reach. Practically on Earth’s doorstep, it is the last military fortress to defend against the alien onslaught. But Reach’s defenders have another, higher priority: to prevent the Covenant from discovering the location of Earth. Outnumbered and outgunned, the soldiers seem to have little chance against the Covenant, but Reach holds a closely guarded secret. It is the training ground for the very first “super soldiers” Code-named SPARTANs, these highly advanced warriors, specially bioengineered and technologically augmented, are the best in the universe…quiet, professional, swift, agile, and deadly. This, is how the SPARTAN program began…

Lieutenant Junior Grade Jacob Keyes had an assignment to assist Doctor Halsey in an experiment that would turn the tide of the war and change the future forever. They were on their way to the Eridanus Two system onboard a diplomatic shuttle, known as the Han. They were to examine one of their test subjects’ number 117, John.

They enter the Eridanus Two system and make there way to the playground on the Elysium City of Primary Education Facility No. 119. Their subject is a child, six years old to be exact. Their mission for now was to only examine the child, Dr. Halsey and Lt. Keyes made there way to the playground only to see a group of kids on a hill, pushing and shoving each other, they were playing king of the hill. But one of them stood out from the others, he was a head taller then the rest and also had a more muscular body then the other children. He was on top of the hill denying anyone who would try and topple him over. Dr. Halsey pulled out a palm-sized pad and opened the file on the subject. The child had all the generic markers she had flagged in her original study…he was as close to a perfect subject for her purposes as science could determine. He was a typical six-year old male. He had brown hair and a slight grin that reveled a gap between his two front teeth, along his face a few freckles. Dr. Halsey took a picture of the child and scanned the freckles on his face and compared them, a match, that was their subject. They finished examining the child and made there way back to Reach.

Sony and Stanford University are thrilled to announce that the Folding@home project has reached the petaflop milestone. Yeah, we had no idea what that meant, either, but what it boils down to is massive computational ability, and it's the first time it's been achieved on a distributed computing network. Those of you with a low tolerance for science might want to stop reading now.

A petaflop is a computer's ability to do one quadrillion floating point operations per second, or FLOPS. To put that in a bit of perspective, "if every person on the planet were to perform a simple mathematical calculation, such as calculating a percentage, each person would have to perform 75,000 calculations every second for the world's population to achieve a petaflop." It's a big calculation, is what we're saying.

So what does it all mean? By achieving the petaflop, scientists with the Folding@home project say they can now conduct research that typically would've had to wait for another 10 years.