Posted on 06/18/2012 7:14:05 PM PDT by mamelukesabre
MANNHEIM, Germany; BERKELEY, Calif.; and KNOXVILLE, Tenn.—For the first time since November 2009, a United States supercomputer sits atop the TOP500 list of the world’s top supercomputers. Named Sequoia, the IBM BlueGene/Q system installed at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory achieved an impressive 16.32 petaflop/s on the Linpack benchmark using 1,572,864 cores.
(Excerpt) Read more at top500.org ...
I bought a Pita the other day. Slipped out of my hand. Pitaflop. Didn’t care for it much.
Dang! I'll bet it's a hoot surfing the web on that baby!
:)
Makes ya wonder what the computers we DON’T know about are like...
For all the good it does. The system is still down too often and chokes routinely.
And they all run an ancient operating system developed 40 years ago called EUNUCHS!
How would you like to pay the bill for 12,660 KW of power consumption for Japan’s #2 Fujitsu?
Where are all the Russian super computers?
I’m still trying to figure out how a cell phone has more processing power than the Lunar Module.
It boggles the mind that today you can run an entire manned mission to the moon using a laptop. Ok, maybe 2 laptops.
True enough, but much of that processing power today is committed to useless tasks. I wonder if my i5 laptop could run the batch processing of the Honeywell 500 (?) machine that I worked with 30 years ago, and it certainly couldn’t do with the Win 7 OS the work of an Alpha DEC machine of 15 years ago, that was serving a couple of hundred terminals, two dozen printers and a good amount of batch processing. That’s to keep in mind. Our laptops, each on its own, are single user machines. Am I wrong?
they got one on the list...number 22
how bout this one...
a current model scientific programmable calculator has more processing power and memory than a commodore 64 personal computer or the first mac.
You mean the “K” computer? yeah that’s nuts. I wonder if thats for the computer only, or for the entire facility?
You'd have to pump out one hell of a lot of Nigerian banking spams to keep up!
Assume about 8 cents per KWH and you probably don’t shut the thing down:
$0.08 x 12660 KW x 8760 Hours per Year = $8,872,128.00 per Year
Peanuts. Our government spends that in about 10 minutes.
I think it’s just the unit vs the facility. The clock speeds are at the higher end of the list, so they throw off a lot more heat. Think of the AC needed to keep the heat under control! That watt to heat conversion could probably heat a village.
I'm pretty confident Cat that it could. One of my favorite technology stories as yours keeps evolving as the comparisons become more outrageous. The computer center where I worked in the late 80s had a DASD farm (direct access storage devices - or hard disks) of perhaps 40 devices - these were each a "cake box" containing eight 12-inch platters sitting on top of a base (with the drive circuitry) that looked like a small refrigerator.
The individual capacity was 5 gig per spindle (the 8 disks). You can get a 4 gig memory stick these days as a free promotional favor at a trade show. The floor required operations staff and serious A/C 24/7. The acquisition cost and operating costs were enormous by today's standards. The total storage capacity of the floor is common on the low-end notebook computers of today.
You are right. These are batch processing machines that also dealt with Time Sharing and Queueing methodologies. The first AS/400 I installed could handle a couple of hundred users and run 6-8 batch jobs at the same time.
Someone on this forum has to be a rocket scientist or at the least knowledgeable in this so as to better inform the thread about this. I would definitely be interested in hearing more.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.