Exascale computing: what can be done with that much supercomputing power?

cognitivecarbon.substack.com ^ | 7/24/2022 | CognitiveCarbon

[ShadowAce]

Wasn’t the article about vast amounts of storage, not computing power?

While large, it does not seem out of reach for us.

My current environment thinks nothing of GB storage, TB is the norm, and we have a few PB filesystems.

[martin_fierro]

Exactly.

(The author is also a big fan of unnecessary parentheticals)

[cymbeline]

“TB is the norm, and we have a few PB filesystems.”

For what it’s worth, the largest available hard disk is 20 TB and the largest solid state storage medium is 16 TB.

A petabyte is 1000 TB which would be 50 20 TB drives.

I’ve wondered how many bits can be put on a square inch of hard drive, and also per square inch of chip.

No telling how many square feet of chips we have on this earth now.

[Bob434]

Lol, yep. My neighbor kept saying that. And for awhile he didn’t need more- then things changed.

I remember downloading loads of game demos on 56k dialup, (they took forever, and one had tk,hope the connection to dialup wasnt lost after a few hours of downloading), and thye were long demos too. Could fit on a cd drive. Then we needed cd’s to store the game -then needed dvd’s beczuse cds didnt have enougn room.

[Theophilus]

btt

[ckilmer]

After the invention of the printing press in 1450 or so—the amount of information in the world doubled every 100 years. The time period for that doubling began to shrink in the 1900’s. By 1945, that doubling of information was down to every 25 years.

Now the amount of information world wide — is doubling about every 18-24 months.

What happens when the doubling goes down to once a year or once every six months or less.

[GaltAdonis]

"...I remember when 1 gig hard drives were introduced..."

I remember when Seagate released a 20 megabyte hard drive
so that all of the folks that owned 1983 vintage IBM PC/XT computers
could updgrade their 10 MB drive machines to 20 MB - WOW!

[minnesota_bound]

Note that Windows versions slow down the more computing power you have. Add SSD more RAM memory, faster CPU. It don’t matter. Windows detects this and slow down..... : )

[ShadowAce]

I’ve wondered how many bits can be put on a square inch of hard drive, and also per square inch of chip.

Here's a good indication