IBM Breaks Own Supercomputer Record: 133 Trillion instructions per second.

Betanews ^ | March 24, 2005 | David Worthington,

[Next_Time_NJ]

IBM has one-upped itself. Big Blue has revealed that it has broken through the 100 teraflop mark and developed the world's fastest supercomputer for the United States National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).

The system is a derivative of IBM's BlueGene/L supercomputer, which won the supercomputing crown back from NEC's Earth Simulator. The NNSA machine is used to simulate nuclear tests as part of an ongoing maintenance program for the U.S. nuclear stockpile.

[Righty_McRight]

I wonder what kind of FPS it gets in Doom3.

[SoDak]

Apparently you care, or you wouldn't have clicked on the thread. Thanks for caring.

[Fast1]

When does it go to China? (sarcasm)

[SoDak]

I wonder if I could load AIX on it.

[InterceptPoint]

Wow. That's 4,194,288,000,000,000,000,000 instructions per year. That's over twice the current record for instructions per year. That record was held by my wife and mostly involved taking out the trash and stopping at Starbucks.

[Next_Time_NJ]

I think it also has to come down to the system itself. You could have a 100 GHZ CPU but if your HD and Graphics card sucks your going to have a crappy FPS. Your computer needs to be in harmony.. Infact a very high end CPU with low end memory, gpu and hd would make make things worse because your system would constently be caching via the page file in windows to keep up with the instructions.

So with that CPU.. you would need a graphics card that hasnt been created yet hehehe.. Maybe a graphics card that has a small hard drive to help cache for the lack of memory it has! Oooh! time to call my patent lawyer!

[Nick Danger]

My puter is STEAM POWERED.

Mine is so old it has tubes. Feeding tubes. And you thought you had escaped from the Schiavo threads. Hah!

[Next_Time_NJ]

3999984741210937.5000 megabytes (abbreviated as M or MB)
3906235098838.80615 gigabytes (abbreviated as G or GB)
3814682713.709772 terabytes
3725276.0876072 petabytes
3637.96492930 exabytes


50 Exabytes would be the text of every spoken word in the history of man kind, from what I read.

[Next_Time_NJ]

Or is that 50 yattabytes? I forget - my brain hurts.

[fork]

You're being a bit harsh on our beloved Apple. They do power the 7th fastest computer in the world. This puts Apple above every other Blue/Gene system on the top500.org list and above all but 6 others *in the world*.

...So perhaps "toys" might not be the right word for you to use here.

Continuing the "rah-rah-apple" theme... the #7 system cost something like $6million. So while it's 1/5 the speed of the #1 system, it's only 1/20 the cost. Maybe it's just a toy to you, but it's still the 7th fastest system in the world.

Personally I don't know why we need supercomputers anyway...everyone knows the answer is 42.

[Jorge]

133 Trillion instructions per second.

Wow. Who counted them?

[ikka]

I think you are off... maybe you mean gigaflops instead of teraflops? There is not a single CPU in the world capable of doing even 1 teraflop.

[ProudVet77]

I understand your loyalty. I first worked with Apple on the Lisa. But the reality is, any networked systems, be they Apple or Intel/AMD based can't match the raw power of a mainframe. The networked systems are a curiosity. Just do the math, how many bits can you shovel down a T1 line? Compare that to a Cray 1024 bit wide parallel bus running at say 500MHz. Now that is shoveling shi!t. And without being insulting when was the last time you worked with an interleaved memory system?
FWIW, the most powerful computers are not even on the list.

[rkhampton]

who cares?!

I don't know who you are, or what you do for a job, but this is the kind of stuff that keeps this nation afloat, so you'd better care.

[E=MC²]

Ooh...this puppy could balance my checkbook in one tenth the normal time it takes.

[Gumption]

Feeding tubes.

Oh man, you deserve a punch (card) for that one.

[WestVirginiaRebel]

"What are you doing, Dave?"

[mwilli20]

Indeed he is off. Home computers are capable of hundreds of megaflops, whereas the computer in the news does a hundred teraflops.

This means that your home computer is around 1 million times slower that the fastest computer in the world.

Sobering thought...

[Euro-American Scum]

IBM Breaks Own Supercomputer Record: 133 Trillion instructions per second.

Amazing what those H1-B Indian guest workers can do. And they work so cheap!

[garjog]

Question for any of you. This power seems far beyond any practical use. I mean, how powerful do computers have to be for home use? What are the practical implications?

How long before we see some of this tech in the home PC and what would it look like I wonder?