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Largest Privately Owned Supercomputer

Posted by timothy on from the beats-the-basement-beowulf-rack dept.

GORMUR writes "IBM has launched its Watson Blue Gene system, the largest privately owned supercompuer seen by the press. The super computer is described reaching a whopping 91.29 teraflops. IBM has plans on giving Academic researchers access to some computing time. Some more info can be found the IBM site. All this makes you wonder what other supercomputers are out there, not known to the press, and if it's time to increase the size of your private key and strengthen your encryption."

11 of 292 comments (clear)

  1. REVENGE! by flawedgeek · · Score: 5, Funny

    Apple, you might wanna rethink that switch to Intel.....

    --
    My other Sig is .40 caliber.
  2. NSA... by ThomasFlip · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I think it's safe to say that the NSA, with it's largest budget out of any intelligence agency in the U.S, has probably cracked the 100 TF mark ? It's a shame we will never no what kind of muscle they can flex.

    --
    If the dollar is an "I owe you nothing", then the Euro is a "Who owes you nothing." - Doug Casey
  3. A 'what' 91.29 teraflops? by metachor · · Score: 5, Funny

    Is 'whopping' really the only adjective adequate enough to describe supercomputer performance?

    Google search of 'supercomputer whopping'.

    1. Re:A 'what' 91.29 teraflops? by Andy_R · · Score: 5, Funny

      Well it does sound better than 'nearly as powerful as 41 playstation 3s'

      --
      A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
  4. Pish posh... by AtariAmarok · · Score: 5, Funny

    Compared to the Milliard Gargantubrain in my garage, this thing is a mere abacus. Consider it not.

    --
    Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
  5. I have a supercomputer by Nicky+G · · Score: 5, Funny

    In my pants.

    1. Re:I have a supercomputer by psvm · · Score: 5, Funny

      I'm afraid you seem to have confused supercomputer with a palm-pilot.

  6. "Seen by the Press" by DyslexicLegume · · Score: 5, Funny

    Notice how the article says "seen by the press"...maybe there's an even more powerful one in the hands of some evil mastermind on an island in the Pacific who is plotting world domination by having it create a super weapon to destroy everything in its path...yet the computer always keeps giving the same answer:

    42

  7. Origins of "whopping" term. by AtariAmarok · · Score: 5, Funny
    "Is 'whopping' really the only adjective adequate enough to describe supercomputer performance? "

    The use of this dates back to the "WOPR" strategic simulations supercomputer used by the Pentagon. Most know it from the documentary film "WarGames". It looked like a locomotive, but boy could it calculate. For several years, it was the standard by which supercomputers were measured. Eventually they came out with faster computers: once twice as fast as the WOPR ran at "two wops", one three times as fas "four wops". Eventually, an H got added in, and as computers left the old WOPR in the dust, the term "whopping" came to mean "Yeah, bud, it's really fast!"

    Want to play a game, Professor Falken?

    --
    Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
  8. I don't like SPAM by ankhcraft · · Score: 5, Funny

    All this makes you wonder what other supercomputers are out there, not known to the press, and if it's time to increase the size of your private key and strengthen your encryption.

    Increase the size of my private ... and strengthen ... wait a sec! Ya' trying to sneak some SPAM past us?

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    ...
  9. Re:Anyone out there care to comment? by saratchandra · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I've been using several supercomputers for my research project. Most of them are very busy. Eg. On the IBM P690(Cheetah) at Oakridge National labs,you have to wait for a week to get your 512 processor job scheduled. This is an extremely busy system. On the other hand,you have systems like the Itaniun cluster at NCSA(National Center for Supercomputing Applications) which schedules your jobs a lot quicker. Actually you can check out the usage of this cluster online at http://tg-monitor.ncsa.teragrid.org/ (don't slashdot it, it is quite useful to a lot of researchers :-) )