IBM's Blue Gene Runs Continuously At 1 Petaflop

An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet is reporting on IBM's claim that the Blue Gene/P will continuously operate at more than 1 petaflop. It is actually capable of 3 quadrillion operations a second, or 3 petaflops. IBM claims that at 1 petaflop, Blue Gene/P is performing more operations than a 1.5-mile-high stack of laptops! 'Like the vast majority of other modern supercomputers, Blue Gene/P is composed of several racks of servers lashed together in clusters for large computing tasks, such as running programs that can graphically simulate worldwide weather patterns. Technologies designed for these computers trickle down into the mainstream while conventional technologies and components are used to cut the costs of building these systems. The chip inside Blue Gene/P consists of four PowerPC 450 cores running at 850MHz each. A 2x2 foot circuit board containing 32 of the Blue Gene/P chips can churn out 435 billion operations a second. Thirty two of these boards can be stuffed into a 6-foot-high rack.'"

Comments

What about Memory?

[sluke]

I recently had a chance to see Francois Gygi, one of the principal authors of qbox (http://eslab.ucdavis.edu/) which is a quantum electronic structure code that has set some performance records on the Blue Gene/L at Livermore. He mentioned that the biggest challenge he faced was the very small amount of memory available to each node of the Blue Gene (something like 256Mb). This forced him to put so much emphasis on the internode communications that simply changing the order of the nodes where the data was distributed in the machine (without changing the way the data itself was split) affected performance by over 100%. This will only get worse as the number of cores per board goes from 2 to 4 on the Blue Gene/P. I couldn't find anything in a quick google search, but does someone know what the plans are for the memory on this new machine?

How far behind are desktops from super-computers?

[Vellmont]

Years ago, shortly after the Pentium first came out and the then astounding "x million flops/second" numbers were floating around, I wondered how far we were behind the power of supercomputers. I remember doing some rough calculations and finding that only a few pentiums could do the calculations of a Cray 1. I don't remember the specifics of how many pentiums/cray, or how rough the calculation was, but that's largely unimportant for my point.

So I have to wonder, what's the equivalent supercomputer that a modern, hefty desktop is capable of performing at? 10 years ago, 20 years ago? Have super-computers accelerated in terms of the speed of increased computing power, stayed the same, or fallen behind desktops?