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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."
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.
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...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
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Hah you think the military is dumb enough to even install Vista? Haven't you ever heard of military intelli... errm.. nevermind. Yeah, I'm sure they have it installed already.
The answer is 42. The question is left as an exercise for the reader.
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
Perhaps they should invest in a computer to track warhead parts.
You want fun, go home and buy a monkey!
Windows: End Program - Untitled - Nuclear Defense. This program is not responding. To return to Windows and check the status of the program, click Cancel. If you choose to end the program immediately, you will loose any unprotected civilians. To end the program now, click End Now. Army personnel: Sir, I think we should send an error report.
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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
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