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TOP500 Supercomputer Sites For 2006
geaux writes to let us know about the release of the 28th TOP500 List of the world's fastest supercomputers. From the article: "The IBM BlueGene/L system, installed at DOE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, retains the No. 1 spot with a Linpack performance of 280.6 teraflops (trillions of calculations per second, or Tflop/s). The new No. 2 systems is Sandia National Laboratories' Cray Red Storm supercomputer, only the second system ever to be recorded to exceed the 100 Tflops/s mark with 101.4 Tflops/s... Slipping to No. 3 is the IBM eServer Blue Gene Solution system, installed at IBM's Thomas Watson Research Center, with 91.20 Tflops/s Linpack performance." You need over 6.6 Tflop/s to make it into the top 100.
Don't be so sure of yourself. There are quite a few reasons for the government and military to need all kinds of computing power. Clustered super computers can come in handy for lots of things including simulations, software testing for many systems such as guidance systems and radar systems and even things as simple as artillary trajectories. You remember those problems right? The whole reason the computer widely accepted as the FIRST computer was ever built.
Just because it doesn't seem to fit what we see as the NSA's MO doesn't mean that the NSA doesn't have use for floating-point math. The whole idea of the NSA is to make sure secrets are kept safe. To help keep those secrets safe, they don't even talk about what secrets they are keeping safe or how they are keeping them safe. There are plenty of scenarios that I can think of off the top of my head for using a floating point processor in building something like an algorithm for a statistical model to show trends apparent in data mined from internet search engines.
The realm of government secrets is an odd area to play speculation in. Just because you don't know about is the best reason to think that something like it actually exists. Will you know about something such as that? Unlikely. At least not any time soon. I wouldn't doubt that there is already technology out there so far ahead of it's time that it may never be declassified due to the dangers it could pose if it was obtained by people looking to do harm.