Yeah, But What About The Graphics?
One of the truism in computers is that real hardware advances are driven by games and their need for ever more resources [as well as M$ Bloat].
The BBC reports that the next milestone has been reached: Supercomputer sets petaflop pace
A supercomputer built with components designed for the Sony PlayStation 3 has set a new computing milestone.
The IBM machine, codenamed Roadrunner, has been shown to run at “petaflop speeds”, the equivalent of one thousand trillion calculations per second.
The benchmark means the computer is twice as nimble as the current world’s fastest machine, also built by IBM.
It will be installed at a US government laboratory later this year where it will monitor the US nuclear stockpile.
It will also be used for research into astronomy, genomics and climate change.
That computer, now known as the Los Alamos Roadrunner, is up an running.
FLOPS stands for FLoating point Operations Per Second, and a petaflops is 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second or 1015 additions, subtractions, etc.
The graphics should be adequate … for a while.
22 comments
Impressive. I remember when the research lab I worked for became the first to build instruments that could measure femtograms of a substance (femto- is the inverse of peta-, i.e., 10^-15 of something). That was over 30 years ago. As you say, it’s quite a milestone… for a while.
(Sorry; the <sup> tag doesn’t work in comments.)
Hmm- 1015, it seems to work for me as does H2O.
It may be because of a privilege.
Six months to a year as Cray and Sun are both working on it. The cell chips do sound interesting.
I find it amazing that the components come from the Playstation 3 and not from some military application. I seem to remember that 20 years ago it was military and space applications that drove technology and not Pong.
Twenty years ago we had a space program and Reagan’s grandiose plans for the Cold War. Everything. but especially basic research, has been cut to the bone, and the only people doing anything new are electronic toy companies.
“Research”, such as it is in this country, is targeted towards getting a product to market. The government has become an arm of business, and supercomputers are not a big seller.
Hmm. I based the assumption on the fact that the preview didn’t show a superscript. This time I’ll publish and see if that’s different…
10-15
(Sigh. I guess it’s owner’s privilege.)
H2O
πr2
[no luck for me either]
gjlrgoburg
co2
[not related to even/odd comments apparently, and my apologies to the blogkeeper for filling up the comments here with basic research 😈 ]
I’ll track this down and fix it, because super- and subscripts have been coming up too often, while no one in comments has ever used “code” or a couple of other “permitted” tags.
Jeez – I thought blogging was for nerds and geeks.
sorry. we non-geeks are taking over. i never did figure out what ‘code’ was for.
“i never did figure out what ‘code’ was for.” – hipparchia
hipparchia, it’s for rendering text in some Courier font that is as difficult as possible to read.
Then again, I’m the one who is frequently guilty of changing the default font in the development environment to another fixed-width font other than Courier, say, Lucida Console. Once on a contract, when I shared an office computer with someone I knew well, I changed the editor font to 20-point Comic Sans MS before I left for the night; the poor fellow faced it before his morning coffee. Fortunately, he was amused.
Let’s see if it works
1015
H2O
It does seem to work.
steve, you’re just plain evil.
oh, wait… is that like when i used to work night shift and left the screen colors at my workstation set on black and purple and screaming neon green? 😈
Y’all tend to create problems for the help desk.
help desk?
i hate to say it, but we were a fly-by-night operation. not even the concept of help desk existed.
I did a lot of corporate work in San Diego, and I got those kind of calls all the time, when someone would change the appearance settings.
Not having a help desk usually resulted in calls to the last person who used the computer.
ot: well, looky here! all your sidebars are finally where they’re supposed to be!
😈
I assume you are talking about the 1 pixel high background graphic that produces the the gray lines down the side. That’s part of the “theme”. The allowed html tags is part of WordPress itself.