tedster - 3:01 pm on Jun 25, 2008 (gmt 0)

In February, the National Science Foundation announced the Cluster Exploratory, a program that funds research designed to run on a large-scale distributed computing platform developed by Google and IBM in conjunction with six pilot universities. The cluster will consist of 1,600 processors, several terabytes of memory, and hundreds of terabytes of storage, along with the software, including Google File System, IBM's Tivoli, and an open source version of Google's MapReduce. Early CluE projects will include simulations of the brain and the nervous system and other biological research that lies somewhere between wetware and software. [wired.com...]

The entire article is an excellent read. The idea is that with enough data, we no longer need to create and test theories. At the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference this past March, Google's research director Peter Norvig observed: "All models are wrong, and increasingly you can succeed without them."