01. 07. 09
It's happened. Well nearly.
Supersonic performance.
The race to petaflop supercomputers is heating up, with the latest entry coming from NASA, Intel and SGI. The trio announced plans to build what will be a petaflop-capable supercomputer by next year, and up to 10 petaflops (define) by 2012.
Supercomputers have been in a constant game of oneupsmanship and bragging rights. The definitive list of the fastest supercomputers, called Top500, is released twice a year, and for the last few years, IBM (NYSE: IBM) has dominated with its Blue Gene/L supercomputer at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories.
With each update to the list, the number of teraflops (define) goes up because no matter how much processing power you give these machines, there's still more demand for them. These massive systems aren't just doing one job at a time. They are rented out to other agencies or researchers who have a massive computing task they need done.
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At any given time, a supercomputer likely has hundreds of computational tasks running on it. So there are never enough teraflops to go around. A teraflop is a trillion operations per second. As of last November, Blue Gene/L topped out at 600 teraflops and ran at a sustained rate of 478 teraflops. By contrast, a Core 2 Duo E6700 processor performs around 12-13 gigaflops, or billions of operations per second.
See the whole tale at http://www.internetnews.com/hardware/article.php/3745856.
