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Cell-based "Roadrunner" Tops Elusive Petaflop Mark
prunedude writes "The NY times is reporting that an American military supercomputer, assembled from components originally designed for video game machines, is more than twice as fast as the previous fastest supercomputer, the I.B.M. BlueGene/L. To put the performance of the machine in perspective, Thomas P. D'Agostino, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said that if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day."
They're trying to pull 1000 times your lab's results.
By can it run Crysis?
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
The military will use this advanced technology to assist and perhaps automate the RTFA process, also known as Reading The Fucking Article, which would allow you to answer your query without posting.
The Rise and Fall of Online Community
...There's no catapult in the world that will catch THAT roadrunner!
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
and roadrunner's always been cel-based, at least in the modern era. i bought one of those cels from the warner bros. store before they went under, nice one too with his tongue sticking out
:(){
The kids these days are lazy, back in my day if we wanted to know if a nuke worked we'd take it out back test it!
Whatever happened to nuked marsh mellows or sitting round with Geiger counters trying to make funny sounds?
Kids are lazy these days!
I bet if everyone had the TI-57, it'll take the aforementioned 46 years.
But the TI-68 will cut it down to 23 years.
"Let my people goto!"
The answer is 42. The question is left as an exercise for the reader.
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day
I'm glad to see the continuing trend of creatively "dumbing down" units of measure (in this case, flops) to the point where they are not only practically useless, but entirely divorced from reality. I would like to propose the following similar, hype-worthy measure for fuel economy:
Old: Miles per gallon
New: Number of miles from which one would smell the excrement from the number of cattle one could feed for a day with the amount of corn it would take to produce one gallon.
And I've heard that republicans eat babies. As someone who has worked with climate models including data collection I can safely say you're full of shit. There are thousands of research stations collecting the data. For it to be generally corrupted, there'd have to be some vast global conspiracy whereby publically competing research stations and countries agree to privately skew their data.
Now there IS something of a vast global conspiracy (PNAC, Republicans, Bilderberg, etc), but, er, it's not on the pro-environmental-sanity side.
FWIW, if anything, the climate change stuff you usually see is an underestimate. 8-(
Quick, make it play tic tac toe against itself.
Perhaps they should invest in a computer to track warhead parts.
You want fun, go home and buy a monkey!
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
They could tell you, but then they'd have to kill you.
Take everyone on earth, and put them each in a different Ferrari Testarossa with no engine, no gas in the tank, and no ignition system. That is how fast this thing moves.
Some other equally useful analogies:
Take the same aforementioned people, and give them a OLPC. The amount of time it takes them all to calculate their degree of separation from Kevin Bacon, and divide by a googolplex. , then round up. That is the number of people that think the calculator analogy in the article was a good one.
Take the inverse of the clock frequency and multiply it by the number of instructions required for Windows to boot far enough to attempt to obtain an IP Address dynamically. Add to that the time it takes for the DHCP request to reach your Billion made router. That is the amount of time it takes for it to hose your router. Take the inverse of the clock frequency and multiply it by the number of instructions it takes to apply a service pack. Add it to the boot time, calculated as described above. That is the amount of time it takes to achieve a BSOD.
HTH,
- Thomas P. D'Agostino
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
The previous model used hundreds of dual core P4s, just running NOP's at full speed. The heat generated, being equivelant to that outputted by a nuke, meant they could run simulations without having to actually write any code.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
Coyotos?
[they do get a lot of military funding, iirc.]
Grr, we're already overpopulated without everyone on the planet multiplying t the same time.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
maybe he should get 6 billion hand calculators and mail them out ?
That's probably a new contender for the stupidest metric ever, it beats 'libraries of congress per second' hands down.
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it's = it is
its = belonging to it
Unless the 128-bit cipher being used is weak, that is the worst case, and the average case is that it takes half that long.
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