165: Chapter 165 Computational Power Collapse: Hitting the Hard Wall of Physical Limits!
Alien Civilization Voyage Timing, Day 37.
8:00 AM, Pangu Laboratory, B2 Level.
Su Che sat before the main console, the screen divided into four independent sandboxes.
In the top left was Academician Qian Zhenhua's optical axis penetration and stealth cracking model, in the top right was Academician Li Zhengyang's noise reduction framework, in the bottom left was the entanglement signal processing interface run by Liu Huaqiang, and in the bottom right was the radar core algorithm written by Su Che himself.
He dragged the four sandboxes into the virtual orbital environment of the Mirror World.
"Joint simulation initiated." Su Che pressed Enter.
The progress bar began to advance slowly.
This was the second phase of the radar research; over six days, four core technologies needed to have their parameters aligned in a virtual environment.
Academician Li Zhengyang walked over, holding a thermos, the bottom of which clicked against the edge of the console.
"The initial weight for my noise reduction algorithm is set too high."
He pointed to the sandbox in the top right corner, "When the quantum signal penetrates the atmosphere, ionospheric disturbance amplifies low-frequency noise. If the weight isn't lowered, the stealth cracking association extraction will mistake noise for signal."
Su Che pulled up the configuration file and lowered the weight parameter by fifteen percent.
"Run it again."
The data streams in the sandboxes began to scroll once more.
Academician Qian Zhenhua was writing furiously at a nearby workstation, the sound of his red ballpoint pen scratching against the draft paper.
Wen Bo was squatting on the floor, wrapping raw material tape around the pipe connection of a backup cooling host.
Alien Civilization Voyage Timing, Day 39.
The joint simulation had been running for three days. Data conflicts began to erupt en masse.
Liu Huaqiang walked over to Academician Li Zhengyang's folding table with his boxed lunch and tapped the desktop with his chopsticks.
"Your Bayesian estimation module, the sampling frequency doesn't match my signal processing terminal."
He stuffed a piece of spare ribs into his mouth.
"My side outputs photon pair data at the order of 10^12 per second, your side can only handle eighty percent per second, and the remaining twenty percent is all clogged up in the cache."
Academician Li Zhengyang flipped through his collection of papers and noted down a formula.
"It can't handle it because Academician Qian's depolarization tensor takes up too many threads. If you get him to lower the tensor dimension by one order, my throughput will be able to go up."
Academician Qian Zhenhua heard this from ten meters away and shouted back, "Lower it by one order? If you lower it by one order, the stealth target will turn into a mosaic! Tell Chief Engineer Su to spare some computing power from the core algorithm!"
Su Che tapped on the keyboard at the main console.
"The core algorithm can't spare any computing power."
He pushed a segment of optimized code to the public server, "I've changed the underlying scheduling logic of Pangu OS to open a high-priority channel for the noise reduction module. Pull the parameters again."
Alien Civilization Voyage Timing, Day 40.
On the screen in the center of the monitoring wall, the Dry Dock at an altitude of four hundred kilometers reached a critical node.
The last keel truss was precisely locked into its predetermined position by two infrastructure robots, and the white light from the plasma welding gun flickered for three seconds.
The metal skeleton of the 100,000-ton-class luan bird was completely joined.
Lieutenant General Peng Zhenbang's dedicated line cut into the secondary screen.
"Chief Engineer Su, the skeleton is complete." There was undisguised excitement in Lieutenant General Peng Zhenbang's voice, "Next, we will fully lay the enclosed assembly cabin shell. In about twenty more days, the space Dry Dock will be completely capped."
Su Che glanced at the skeleton of the massive artificial beast.
"Proceed with the shell laying according to the original plan." Su Che cut off the communication.
He had no time to celebrate; the parameter alignment for the joint simulation had reached the most critical juncture.
The coupling degree of the four technologies was becoming increasingly high, and the target images captured by the virtual radar in the Mirror World were becoming clearer and clearer.
Alien Civilization Voyage Timing, Day 42.
11:50 PM.
Su Che pressed the final confirmation key.
On the screen, the boundaries of the four sandboxes disappeared, merging into a complete Global Deep Space Quantum Radar virtual system.
The simulation test report popped up.
Penetration attenuation rate: Met standard.
Stealth cracking correlation: Met standard.
Noise reduction signal-to-noise ratio: Met standard.
Core algorithm response latency: Met standard.
Six days of joint simulation ended, and all parameters were aligned.
Su Che stood up from his chair and loosened his stiff cervical spine.
Tomorrow, they would enter the final full-link system joint debugging.
They would feed the virtual data into the real hardware, using the 3nm quantum chip array of the Pangu Quantum Computer for physical support.
Alien Civilization Voyage Timing, Day 43.
The first day of full-link system joint debugging.
Workshop No. 3 delivered the assembled radar hardware prototype.
The huge superconducting signal receiving unit and the entanglement generator were placed in the center of the hall, with cables connected to the main node of the Pangu Quantum Computer like a spider web.
Su Che initiated the hardware self-test.
"Generator pump module normal." Wen Bo reported the numbers.
"Receiving end superconducting coil cooled." Liu Huaqiang adjusted his glasses.
"Power on, run benchmark test." Su Che gave the command.
The server cabinet cluster of the Pangu Quantum Computer emitted a low roar, and the 3nm quantum chip array began to process data.
The first day of benchmark testing went very smoothly; in an interference-free state, the radar successfully completed quantum entanglement imaging of an abandoned weather satellite in low Earth orbit, with the 3D contour being incredibly clear.
Alien Civilization Voyage Timing, Day 44.
The second day of joint debugging, adding the atmospheric penetration test.
The data volume doubled.
The computing power usage rate of the Pangu Quantum Computer soared from thirty percent to fifty-five percent, and the cooling fans of the Yiren AI Core sped up significantly.
Imaging was still successful, but the latency increased by 0.2 seconds.
Alien Civilization Voyage Timing, Day 45.
The third day of joint debugging, superimposing stealth cracking and weak signal noise reduction.
Academician Qian Zhenhua and Academician Li Zhengyang stood on both sides of the console, their gazes locked onto the data stream.
"Stealth hash feature extraction starting." Academician Qian Zhenhua gripped his ballpoint pen.
"Floor noise separation connected." The thermos in Academician Li Zhengyang's hand hovered in mid-air.
Computing power usage exceeded eighty percent.
The images on the screen began to show slight tearing; that was dropped frames caused by the data processing speed failing to keep up with the acquisition speed.
Su Che's fingers flew across the keyboard, constantly adjusting the memory allocation of Pangu OS, barely piecing the torn images back together.
Alien Civilization Voyage Timing, Day 46.
The fourteenth day of development, the final full-link system joint debugging.
This was the final step.
Simulating a real deep space environment, enabling full-dimensional, full-frequency band, maximum power detection.
The target was set to the high-dimensional spatial anchor point at the 1200-kilometer orbit deduced earlier.
10:00 AM.
The entire B2 level was so quiet that not even the sound of breathing could be heard.
Su Che sat in the very center of the main console, with Liu Huaqiang, Academician Qian Zhenhua, Academician Li Zhengyang, and Wen Bo standing behind him.
Lin Waner stood at the entrance of the pantry, holding a tray, not moving forward.
"Full power start." Su Che pressed the Enter key heavily.
The entanglement generator instantly ramped up to full capacity of 1.2 x 10^12 per second.
A massive amount of entangled photon pairs rushed into space.
The receiving end superconducting unit was flooded with echo data.
Academician Qian Zhenhua's stealth cracking algorithm was running at full load, and Academician Li Zhengyang's noise reduction framework had all three layers activated.
The torrent of data, like a breached tsunami, crashed into the 3nm quantum chip array of the Pangu Quantum Computer without reservation.
"Computing power usage at ninety percent!" Liu Huaqiang's voice changed pitch.
"It's still rising! Ninety-five percent!"
The roar of the server cabinet cluster turned into a sharp whine, and the circulation pump of the liquid nitrogen cooling system operated at overclocked speeds, with a thick layer of white frost forming on the pipe walls.
The high-dimensional anchor point image on the screen had just outlined a blurry contour.
"Computing power usage at ninety-nine percent!" Liu Huaqiang braced himself against the desk.
Su Che's hands left afterimages on the keyboard, trying to cut off non-core threads to save the main process.
It was too late.
The quantum state changes at the order of 10^12 per second, combined with depolarization tensor operations, Bayesian back-inference, and 3D spatial modeling.
This was no longer a problem that could be solved by optimizing code; this was the hard wall of physical laws.
"Bang!"
Cabinet No. 3 emitted a dull explosion.
The motherboard overload protection was forcibly triggered.
Immediately after, cabinets No. 5, No. 9, and No. 12 lost power one after another.
The blurry contour on the screen instantly shattered into a sky full of garbled code.
A piercing alarm sounded throughout the hall.
The main screen was occupied by a huge red box.
[Fatal error: Hardware computing power exhausted.]
[Quantum state parsing timed out, data overflow.]
[Global Deep Space Quantum Radar joint debugging failed.]
The whining ceased, and the speed of the cooling pump slowly decreased.
There was a deathly silence in the hall.
The ballpoint pen in Academician Qian Zhenhua's hand fell to the floor and rolled under the console.
Academician Li Zhengyang set his thermos on the table without screwing on the lid.
Fourteen days of working around the clock, the lifeblood of four top academicians.
They had died at the very last step.
Su Che leaned back in his chair, feeling no anger, not throwing the keyboard.
He pulled up the hardware logs from before the system crash and glanced at the parameters frozen at the end.
"It's not an algorithm issue." Su Che's voice was steady, without a ripple.
"The physical limit of the 3nm quantum chip has been reached; its etching precision and quantum dot arrangement density cannot withstand the data concurrency of deep space global detection."
He stood up and looked around at the silent crowd.
"A hundred-thousand-ton mothership doesn't deserve this outdated brain." Su Che uploaded the logs to the public server, "Radar project suspended."