Bah. In 20 years my wrist watch will have more computing power.

And everyone knows the most powerful computer ever built was the Earth, in order to find the answer to the question of life, the universe and everything.

Elypse /what are we going to do about N.Korea?

And even using this for CS, I would still complain the lag got me

Horg

I dunno. oWnz0r them at counterstrike?

Damn lag.

Shame its only about 1.2 petaflop shy necessary to operate a dilithium-based warp core. Shame.

so this whole thing was built to tell them what to do with toxic waste?

I'm going to laugh when the thing just spits out a black screen with the text "use 40 gallon drum + concrete dumba$$eS" on it.

Ahh, everyone knows PETA are teramists anyway.

/if I beat a dead horse some more, will PETA get upset?

Times like this I wish the Top500 would list the true "classified" supercomputers. I'd love to see how some of the farms out at Fort Meade compare. I'm guessing they make this supercomputer look like a TRS-80.

That's fast....but will it dream?

NEC's Earth Simulator, 41 teraflops, Japan

Anyone else suspect that this is what they're running the Matrix on?

The "distributed" supercomputer running SETI@Home runs at 40.82 TeraFLOPs/sec

Pathighgate
everyone knows the most powerful computer ever built was the Earth, in order to find the answer to the question of life, the universe and everything.

What is six times nine?

42.

heheee

I call bullshiat. Everyone knows that the new Mac G5 is the fastest computer in the world. Steve Jobs told me so.

terraflop not petaflob mr. smarty pants submitter.

Will I get 500 frames per second playing Planetside, though?

Um...

I have a Dell...

/nothin'

/Shall we play a game?

Yeah, petaflops.. That word alone made me read the article. I've built a couple of Tflop systems and seeing "petaflop" made me suddenly feel angst and depression. False alarm, for now.

But does it have a cool window on the side so you can see all the boards and wires lit with a UV light?

Times like this I wish the Top500 would list the true "classified" supercomputers. I'd love to see how some of the farms out at Fort Meade compare. I'm guessing they make this supercomputer look like a TRS-80.

Fort Meade's stuff is so specialized that you can't make a one for one comparison. If you want an idea of what they have take a look at the Cray X1. It is state of the art and they probably have one system comprised of a few dozen of these puppies all linked as one big vectored box.

http://www.cray.com/products/systems/x1/images.html

It's a Lamborghini with a keyboard port.

it's teraflops, not petaflops

for your reference:

Prefix
Symbol(s)
Power of 10
Power of 2


yocto-
y
10^{-24 *}
--


zepto-
z
10^{-21 *}
--


atto-
a
10^{-18 *}
--


femto-
f
10^{-15 *}
--


pico-
p
10^{-12 *}
--


nano-
n
10^{-9 *}
--


micro-
m
10^{-6 *}
--


milli-
m
10^{-3 *}
--


centi-
c
10^{-2 *}
--


deci-
d
10^{-1 *}
--


(none)
--
100
20


deka-
D
10^{1 *}
--


hecto-
h
10^{2 *}
--


kilo-
k or K **
103
210


mega-
M
106
220


giga-
G
109
230


tera-
T
1012
240


peta-
P
1015
250


exa-
E
10^{18 *}
260


zetta-
Z
10^{21 *}
270


yotta-
Y
10^{24 *}
280


* Not generally used to express data speed


** k = 103 and K = 210

god I am so sorry - table tags don't work here... /kicks self...

Studham said the new computer was specially designed to use its number-crunching and analytical powers to perform tasks of value to the region. Managing the aged underground tanks of mixed radioactive waste left from the Energy Department's bomb works at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, which threaten to contaminate the groundwater, is one such job.

"We need to understand the sub-surface flow at Hanford and do a full (computer) model of it over many years," Studham said.

"Here I am, brain the size of planet, and what do they ask me to do? Study some poisonous dirt. Don't talk to me about Life."

That's a lot of floppy disks. Are they the 5 1/4" floppies of the 3 1/2" floppies? Where will they keep them all? Should've just installed a hard drive. They are getting pretty inexpensive these days. I hear you can buy a 40 MB hard disk for like $179 now. I'm saving up for one for my 386. I'm getting tired of running WordPerfect off of floppy disks.

/living in the past

I checked out the Cray site. Their fastest machine, the X1, can do 52.4 Tflops. That's almost 5 times as fast as this clunker. If you take the earth simulator (#1, 41 TF) and add this one (#5, 11.8TF), then you get what a top of the line Cray can do.

My guess is that NSA has at least two of the 52.4 Tflop X1's. But that just a guess.

Oh yeah, one of the 52.4 Tflop X1's would run about $160 million. Drop in the bucket for the gov't.

Yes, my first question is what operating system does this thing run on? I mean can you imagine building a computer that powerful and that fast then loading Windows XP on it so that some scientist can play Spider Solitaire ultra-fast on it? But seriously, to show my ignorance, who does make the operating systems for these behemoths? I'm guessing it is not Microsoft. Anybody know?

I was a tad surprised to read 'petaflop'. Glad and disappointed at the same time.

jwa007: "The Richland lab's new supercomputer was built by Hewlett-Packard using the Linux operating system and, according to Studham, represents the first use of Intel's new "Itanium-2" processors. The cost of the computer was $24.5 million."

So It's Linux for IA64.

Well DUH!!!! If I had read the article instead of skimming it I would not have had to ask such a dumb question. My apologies and thanks to MikeWeath.

The bad news about this? It can barely run Half-Life 2.

jwa007, It uses some flavor of linux. I'm not sure which one, but I'm pretty sure it's linux.

As a proud graduate of Richland High I salute our bold progress into flushing more money into the sinkhole that is the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Without such a huge per-capita of PhD's and government money, who knows how my education would have turned out? :)

Kidding aside, I've got friends who work at the lab and do good work, of which only 70-75% max is porn related. Nothin' but love guys, keep up the good work! ;)

too2ez, you forgot about the 102 key keyboard.

Is this another Steve Job's made-up word?? Petaflop??

Wow! 10^15 floating point operations per!

Wait, Per what? per thousand seconds, apparently.

LOL

Petaflop

sounds dirty.

Use TRANSMETA chips.

Disclosure: Gelatinous owns shares of TMTA.

Petaflops?! I wouldn't want one of them living in my neighborhood, that's for sure. I mean, there's small children playing out of doors nearly every day and I don't see any parents around. When I was young they would've just put someone like that down for the good of everybody, but not anymore. I'm sure glad they have to print their names in the paper so we know which ones to run off right away. Lord have mercy!

chakalakasp:
Man, I can't wait for yottabytes. "I have a 40 yottabyte drive!"



By God, imagine the amount of porn you could fit on that. Millions of movies, or just one REALLY good one.

Thank you SquirrelHill! I knew something was fishy when I saw the headline. On a related subject, I just finished reading "Body of Secrets". Excellent book on NSA history, technology & culture. Found out more than I wanted to know about USS Liberty & Israeli attack on that boat. Seems like quite a bit of CYA went on. But that's another story...

Liberty reference makes my sig seem a bit creepy (ier?)now.

Simulations can take you places you can't get to otherwise

Yeah - Lave, Reorte, Zaonce, Xeer, Diso, to name but a few

bltpdx
chakalakasp

I have never laughed harder at any fark post, ever.

I hope you were being sarcastic.

Imagine a beowu....

Sorry, wrong forum