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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.'"
But does it run Linux?
seems like a datacenter of these things would singlehandedly trigger global warming.
in other news the other day, d'ja see in the trade rags that they have cyclical power outages in the NSA area of Fort Meade, VA, due to the oversized demands of (classified) computing power?
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
"will continuously operate at more than 1 petaflop" makes no sense. You could say "1 petaflop per second", construing "flop" to mean "FLoating point OPeration", or say "1 petaflops", if you prefer "flops" as "FLoating point Operations Per Second". If you leave out both the word "second" and the letter "s" from the abbreviation, then it doesn't mean anything. It's like saying that your car can "operate at 250 km".
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.