second (n.)
"one-sixtieth of a minute," 1391, from O.Fr. seconde, from M.L. secunda, short for secunda pars minuta "second diminished part," the result of the second division of the hour by sixty (the first being the "prime minute," now called the minute), from L. secunda, fem. of secundus (see second (adj.)). Shortened form sec first recorded 1860.
So sort of true, but of course the use of second and minute as time units originates in Latin.
I wonder how the Fold@Home total CPU power compare to this in terms of percentage?
They don't. This seems something that needs to be cleared up every supercomputing topic. Things you can calculate on a supercomputer, like the LINPACK benchmarks, are impossible using distributed network computing. Network computing is only useful for problems that can be chopped up in many pieces, each
of which can be solved by one computer on its own.
In problems that supercomputers have to deal with, hydrodynamics, climate modelling, the work can be chopped up, but partial results of each processor need to be communicated to other processors and this many times during computation. Now if you think how many messages you can send over a network in a second and compare this with the number of computations that can be done in a second, it is easy to see that this kind of communication easily becomes a bottleneck. Even a processor accessing its own memory experiences this kind of bottlenecks, now imagine a system in which a few thousand processors have to share some information. As an extra handycap the problems of cooling an overclocked pentium is child's play compared to cooling thousands of processors crammed together.
If it weren't for these practical problems, a little math shows that if you would tie some 20,000 Pentium-4, 3Ghz 's together (each giving you about 3800 MFlop/s), you would have yourself a system of
76 TeraFlop/s for only $20 milion. And you think you can buy a Blue Gene for that money....
Though it's a good thing to have independent public broadcasting, separate taxes don't help very much. In the end it is still the government that decides how much this fee is going to be. The main reason originally to have a separate tax was that only people with a tv set should have to pay (hence the reduced fee for people without a tv but with radio). Now it's just a very inefficient way to raise taxes with the need for a special agency to check on those handful of freaks that say they don't own a tv.
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From http://www.etymonline.com/:
second (n.)
"one-sixtieth of a minute," 1391, from O.Fr. seconde, from M.L. secunda, short for secunda pars minuta "second diminished part," the result of the second division of the hour by sixty (the first being the "prime minute," now called the minute), from L. secunda, fem. of secundus (see second (adj.)). Shortened form sec first recorded 1860.
So sort of true, but of course the use of second and minute as time units originates in Latin.
In problems that supercomputers have to deal with, hydrodynamics, climate modelling, the work can be chopped up, but partial results of each processor need to be communicated to other processors and this many times during computation. Now if you think how many messages you can send over a network in a second and compare this with the number of computations that can be done in a second, it is easy to see that this kind of communication easily becomes a bottleneck. Even a processor accessing its own memory experiences this kind of bottlenecks, now imagine a system in which a few thousand processors have to share some information. As an extra handycap the problems of cooling an overclocked pentium is child's play compared to cooling thousands of processors crammed together.
If it weren't for these practical problems, a little math shows that if you would tie some 20,000 Pentium-4, 3Ghz 's together (each giving you about 3800 MFlop/s), you would have yourself a system of 76 TeraFlop/s for only $20 milion. And you think you can buy a Blue Gene for that money....
Though it's a good thing to have independent public broadcasting, separate taxes don't help very much. In the end it is still the government that decides how much this fee is going to be. The main reason originally to have a separate tax was that only people with a tv set should have to pay (hence the reduced fee for people without a tv but with radio). Now it's just a very inefficient way to raise taxes with the need for a special agency to check on those handful of freaks that say they don't own a tv.