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BOINC Exceeds 2 Petaflop/s Barrier

Posted by kdawson on from the faster-faster-for-science dept.

Myrrh writes "Though an official announcement has not yet been made, it would appear that the BOINC project as a whole has exceeded two petaflop/s performance. The top page features this legend: '24-hour average: 2,793.53 TeraFLOPS.' According to last month's Top500 list of supercomputers, BOINC's performance is now beating that of the fastest supercomputer, RoadRunner, by more than a factor of two (with the caveat that BOINC has not been benchmarked on Linpack)."

7 of 114 comments (clear)

  1. Finally! by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 5, Funny

    BOINC finally has enough computing power to handle Vista Ultimate and a few applications!

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    1. Re:Finally! by basementman · · Score: 5, Funny

      I think you meant Ubuntu with Firefox playing a flash video.

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    2. Re:Finally! by ijakings · · Score: 5, Funny

      I think you mean OSX with smug set to maximum.

  2. Missed opportunity by DoofusOfDeath · · Score: 5, Funny

    We could make T-shirts saying "Computer scientists BOINC faster", but I not sure that sends the right message.

  3. Still far behind... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Folding@home, which has passed 5 petaflops on February. Note that Folding is a single project, while the Petaflop measurement for BOINC are the aggregate total for that platform, which runs many independent and often unrelated projects.

    Getting that thing bundled on PS3 was brilliant.

  4. Grid computing != supercomputing by SpaFF · · Score: 5, Informative

    According to last month's Top500 list of supercomputers, BOINC's performance is now beating that of the fastest supercomputer, RoadRunner, by more than a factor of two (with the caveat that BOINC has not been benchmarked on Linpack)

    Sigh...why do these projects (BOINC, *@home, etc.) insist on comparing their performance to superpercomputers on the TOP500 list? Of course BOINC has not been benchmarked on Linpack. If it was, the performance wouldn't come close to anything at the top of the TOP500 list. A bunch of workstations running a grid client and talking to each other over the internet is never going to have the same type of message passing bandwidth as a supercomputer using something like locally connected infiniband.

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  5. Re:I wonder what BOINC's contribution to CO2 outpu by MBCook · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'm aware. My point is that I'm tired of "but how much CO2 does it generate?" being tacked on to everything because it's the current fad question.

    The coming ice-age was a science disaster fad. So was the coming overpopulation and world famine. And the ozone holes that would cause everyone to get skin cancer. And....

    There are more important questions. Much of this energy would be used anyway, but it would be in centralized supercomputers. This way though it's cheaper for the scientists so we can get more research done, even though it's slightly less efficient.

    I'm just really tired about CO2 being discussed attached to everything. "Should I buy new shoes?" "Well, the CO2 produced from rubber is... and.... but...".

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