Superputer sets record

[DesertFox]

An American military supercomputer, assembled from components originally designed for video game machines, has reached a long-sought-after computing milestone by processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second.

The new machine is more than twice as fast as the previous fastest supercomputer, the IBM BlueGene/L, which is based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

The new $133 million supercomputer, called Roadrunner in a reference to the state bird of New Mexico, was devised and built by engineers and scientists at IBM and Los Alamos National Laboratory, based in Los Alamos, New Mexico. It will be used principally to solve classified military problems to ensure that the nation's stockpile of nuclear weapons will continue to work correctly as they age. The Roadrunner will simulate the behavior of the weapons in the first fraction of a second during an explosion.

Before it is placed in a classified environment, it will also be used to explore scientific problems like climate change. The greater speed of the Roadrunner will make it possible for scientists to test global climate models with higher accuracy. ...

By breaking the petaflop barrier sooner than had been generally expected, the United States' supercomputer industry has been able to sustain a pace of continuous performance increases, improving a thousandfold in processing power in 11 years. The next thousandfold goal is the exaflop, which is a quintillion calculations per second, followed by the zettaflop, the yottaflop and the xeraflop.

More (http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/06/09/technology/09petaflops.php)

[DesertFox]

They'll stay at it until their only limitation will be the speed of light itself. This stuff is beyond extraordinary.

[DoctorDoom]

That's a LOT of flops. And it shows the raw computing power in video game consoles. Who remembers Pong?

BTW, for the lost:

In computing, FLOPS (or flops or flop/s) is an acronym meaning FLoating point Operations Per Second. The FLOPS is a measure of a computer's performance, especially in fields of scientific calculations that make heavy use of floating point calculations, similar to instructions per second. Since the final S stands for "second", conservative speakers consider "FLOPS" as both the singular and plural of the term, although the singular "FLOP" is frequently encountered. Alternatively, the singular FLOP (or flop) is used as an abbreviation for "FLoating-point OPeration", and a flop count is a count of these operations (e.g., required by a given algorithm or computer program). In this context, "flops" is simply the plural rather than a rate.FLOPS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS)

In computing, floating point describes a numerical representation system in which a string of digits (or bits) represents a real number.

The term floating point refers to the fact that the radix point (decimal point, or, more commonly in computers, binary point) can "float": that is, it can be placed anywhere relative to the significant digits of the number. This position is indicated separately in the internal representation, and floating-point representation can thus be thought of as a computer realization of scientific notation. Over the years several different floating-point representations have been used in computers; however, for the last ten years the most commonly encountered representation is that defined by the IEEE 754-1985 Standard.

The advantage of floating-point representation over fixed-point (and integer) representation is that it can support a much wider range of values. For example, a fixed-point representation that has eight decimal digits, with the decimal point assumed to be positioned after the sixth digit, can represent the numbers 123456.78, 8765.43, 123.00, and so on, whereas a floating-point representation with eight decimal digits could also represent 1.2345678, 1234567.8, 0.000012345678, 12345678000000000, and so on. The floating-point format needs slightly more storage (to encode the position of the radix point), so when stored in the same space, floating-point numbers achieve their greater range at the expense of slightly less precision.

The speed of floating-point operations is an important measure of performance for computers in many application domains. It is measured in "megaFLOPS" (million floating-point operations per second), or GigaFLOPS, etc. World-class supercomputer installations are generally rated in teraflops.
Floating point (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_point)

Your $5 calculator does floating-point arithmetic.

[CONSERVATIVE HERO]

They'll stay at it until their only limitation will be the speed of light itself. This stuff is beyond extraordinary.
Think bigger DF. Does this mean I'll be able to one day soon own noobs on Halo 3 in 400 man team maps with no video lag?

Now that's extraordinary! :biggrin:

[DesertFox]

:roar: Does this mean I'll be able to one day soon own noobs on Halo 3 in 400 man team maps with no video lag? :rotflmbo:

[DeclinetoState]

In computing, FLOPS (or flops or flop/s) is an acronym meaning FLoating point Operations Per Second. The FLOPS is a measure of a computer's performance, especially in fields of scientific calculations that make heavy use of floating point calculations, similar to instructions per second. Since the final S stands for "second", conservative speakers consider "FLOPS" as both the singular and plural of the term, although the singular "FLOP" is frequently encountered. Alternatively, the singular FLOP (or flop) is used as an abbreviation for "FLoating-point OPeration", and a flop count is a count of these operations (e.g., required by a given algorithm or computer program). In this context, "flops" is simply the plural rather than a rate.

"Flop" is Big Brown at the Belmont.

[DoctorDoom]

One wonders how much effect the cracked hoof had.

[DesertFox]

I think they forgot which drug worked the first time.