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."

Comments

Re:Not in perspective - this is a media number

[mykepredko]

This is a perfect example of a propellor head trying to come up with an analogy for a media/marketing type. I suspect that this was the only one that the powers that be felt non-techies could relate to. I've been asked to come up with these analogies a couple of times and it can be pretty frustrating on both sides.

I suspect the first example of this happening was trying to estimate how many angels could fit on the head of a pin.

Other meaningless analogies could be:

• How long it would take Roadrunner to count all the atoms in the universe
  
• What speed your car would run at if the speed difference between Roadrunner and your home computer was multiplied by 60 mph
  
• If we could go this many times faster than the speed of light, how fast could we cross the universe
  
• If in every instruction it could take in one byte of text, how long it would take to read the Library of Congress
  
• How fast it could render "The Incredibles" compared to how long it took the original server farm (actually, this might be one that's understandable)
  
• How fast it could break the 128 bit encryption used when you log onto your bank's web page to pay your bills (this might also be understandable and would probably be a bit scary)
  

The simple fact is that a petaflop computer works faster than humans can conceive and any kind of analogy cannot be comprehended.

myke