forever in blue genes

Rice supercomputer less interested in conquering the world, more concerned withearthquakes and genetic mapping

Deep Blue computer playing chess against Garry Kasparov
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Rice's new Blue Gene/P in all its glory.
HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey
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Remember when the world feared the supercomputer? We had HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Skynet in The Terminator and the evil Master Control Program in Tron — all ready to squash the human race with their ability to make cold, calculating decisions without all that pesky morality.

But since the Y2K scare, 21st-century humanity seems have gotten over its worries about a future digital Armageddon. In fact, Houston's own Rice University has become a hotbed of supercomputing in the past decade and recently announced the acquisition of its fifth mega-machine — an ultrafast IBM Blue Gene/P.

"The supercomputer is basically just a bunch of CPUs, like you'd have in your PC or Macintosh, all linked together," explained Rice University's Gary Kidney. Think of thousands of Macs working on a single computation.

CultureMap spoke with Gary Kidney, who directs academic and research computing at Rice, for a little more on the university's need for speed.

"The supercomputer is basically just a bunch of CPUs, like you'd have in your PC or Macintosh, all linked together," he explained. Think of thousands of Macs working on a single computation. Complex problems are solved in seconds rather than months and allow researchers to simulate theoretical situations like the future of Earth's climate or the collision of galaxies.

While technology has come a long way since IBM's Deep Blue defeated chess master Garry Kasparov in 1997, this notion of parallel computing — the simultaneous processing of multiple calculations — has changed little.

"The computers themselves are pretty much the same as they were 15 years ago," he said. "What's changed is our ability to connect them together into larger clusters, allowing for more parallel computations."

This increased ability has allowed for recent major advances in bioengineering as well as human voice recognition, as demonstrated by IBM's Watson and its clean sweep on Jeopardy! in 2011. When Rice's Blue Gene is fully operable by mid-April, researchers plan to concentrate on energy, geophysics, bioscience and cancer research.

But CultureMap had one more question. Just how close are we to artificial intelligence?

"If you're ever going to achieve the capability or the intelligence of the human brain — and whether that's even feasible or not is still in question — you need the ability to do multiple calculations in parallel, the ability to exchange information at lightning speed, and a massive database to store and serve it up when it's needed."

For today's scientists, Kidney noted, artificial intelligence works best with fairly straight-forward scenarios and tasks. Rice researcher James McLurkin, for example, is working with AI to program a team of robots to locate people after an earthquake by mapping and predicting possible patterns of destruction.

So much for the robot apocalypse in 2012. . . For now, supercomputers appear to be on the side of humans.

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Thanks, Queen Bey

Pop icon Beyoncé donates $100,000 to University of Houston Law School

Photo by Erza Shaw Getty Images

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Pop megastar Beyoncé Knowles-Carter has donated $100,000 to the University of Houston Law Center Criminal Justice Clinic through her BeyGOOD Foundation. The gift will allow the clinic to hire fill-time faculty to head it, benefiting the students who study there.

“I am delighted that the BeyGOOD Foundation has made this very generous gift to the UH Law Center,” said Leonard Baynes, dean of the UH Law Center. “Not only will this funding help establish a full-time criminal justice clinic that provides pro bono legal services in our community, but it will also supercharge our already excellent criminal law and justice programming.”

The clinic is one of nine at UHLC. It helps students learn to navigate the criminal justice system, especially on behalf of clients that are underserved by skilled attorneys. People of color are affected disproportionately by a lack of good, ethical representation.

Beyoncé, the most decorated artist in Grammy history and easily the biggest musical star native to Houston, has a long history of advocating for criminal justice reform. She was a staunch supporter of the police reform following the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, asking law enforcement to “stop killing us” in a web post. In 2020, she penned an open letter to the Kentucky attorney general asking for justice in the death of Breonna Taylor.

Through her BeyGOOD Foundation, established in 2013, Beyoncé has focused mostly on expanding the prospects of Black-owned business and offering education opportunities to students. Forwarding the cause of legal representation in Texas while also helping out marginalized communities compliments her other philanthropic work.

“At UH Law, we envision a legal profession where ‘everyone has the opportunity to prosper,’ as BeyGOOD envisions, and we will achieve this vision by providing access to strong and effective legal representation in criminal proceedings,” Baynes said. “And together, through this gift, the BeyGOOD Foundation and UHLC will shepherd the next generation of criminal justice attorneys in the city of Houston, the state of Texas and the nation.”