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China Bumps US Out of First Place For Fastest Supercomptuer
An anonymous reader writes "China's Tianhe-2 is the world's fastest supercomputer, according to the latest semiannual Top 500 list of the 500 most powerful computer systems in the world. Developed by China's National University of Defense Technology, the system appeared two years ahead of schedule and will be deployed at the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzho, China, before the end of the year."
Quickly before they sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids!
I'll bite. You seem to think that distributed computing, however you are defining that, is a better solution. I am going to assume your primary objection then is using infiniband (or some other low latency interconnect such as Numalink or Gemini). What then, would you propose to do with the class of problems that are rely on extremely low latency transmission of data between nodes?
As a computational physicist:
"flop" is sometimes used to mean "floating point operation", when you're talking about the compute cost of an algorithm. For instance:
"The Wilson dslash operation requires 1,320 flops per site" or "The comm/compute balance of this operation is 3.2 bytes per flop".
So saying "ten flops per second" is fine -- "flops" is the plural of "flop".
Yes, "flops" is also acronymized as "... per second", and while that's the most common use it's not exclusive.