Blog Entry © Wednesday, January 8, 2025, by James Pate Williams, Jr. Elon Musk’s Ambitious Supercomputer Thoughts

Elon Musk’s choice of geographic location for his Collossus supercomputer, namely, Memphis, TN, was probably a bad choice. A better site with more TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) power support would have been Oak Ridge, TN. The Collossus name probably came from the science fiction book Collossus: The Forbin Project by the British author Dennis Feltham Jones which was copyrighted in 1966. A movie by the same name was released in 1970. Elon Musk’s AI entity is named Grok which is a verb from the science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein. Grok means to deeply understand. The supercomputer may one day consist of 1,000,000 Nvidia Graphical Processing Units. The computer’s power requirements are enormous.

Unknown's avatar

Author: jamespatewilliamsjr

My whole legal name is James Pate Williams, Jr. I was born in LaGrange, Georgia approximately 70 years ago. I barely graduated from LaGrange High School with low marks in June 1971. Later in June 1979, I graduated from LaGrange College with a Bachelor of Arts in Chemistry with a little over a 3 out 4 Grade Point Average (GPA). In the Spring Quarter of 1978, I taught myself how to program a Texas Instruments desktop programmable calculator and in the Summer Quarter of 1978 I taught myself Dayton BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) on LaGrange College's Data General Eclipse minicomputer. I took courses in BASIC in the Fall Quarter of 1978 and FORTRAN IV (Formula Translator IV) in the Winter Quarter of 1979. Professor Kenneth Cooper, a genius poly-scientist taught me a course in the Intel 8085 microprocessor architecture and assembly and machine language. We would hand assemble our programs and insert the resulting machine code into our crude wooden box computer which was designed and built by Professor Cooper. From 1990 to 1994 I earned a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from LaGrange College. I had a 4 out of 4 GPA in the period 1990 to 1994. I took courses in C, COBOL, and Pascal during my BS work. After graduating from LaGrange College a second time in May 1994, I taught myself C++. In December 1995, I started using the Internet and taught myself client-server programming. I created a website in 1997 which had C and C# implementations of algorithms from the "Handbook of Applied Cryptography" by Alfred J. Menezes, et. al., and some other cryptography and number theory textbooks and treatises.

Leave a comment