IBM unveils fastest supercomputer

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Original Author: daniel rodreques

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Computer giant IBM has unveiled the IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer that has a processing speed of one petaflop per second,

meaning it can solve one quadrillion floating point math problems per second.
A quadrillion is a million billions, or one followed by 15 zeroes, while a "floating point operation" means an arithmetic problem involving two numbers with decimal points.
"Supercomputers are constantly leapfrogging each other in terms of speed, and they are tuned for different types of calculations. But it is fair to say that the IBM machine is one of the fastest at the moment," said James Staten, analyst at Forrest Research, a high-tech market research firm.
According to LiveScience , the Blue Gene, like all modern supercomputers, is based on clusters of fairly ordinary computer processors — tens of thousands of them. It is built around the IBM PowerPC 450 processor running at a rate of 850 million cycles per second.
The processors are lined up in racks standing more than six feet high, with 4,096 processors per rack, and to reach the speed of one petaflop, the Blue Gene/P (which is three times faster than its predecessor, Blue Gene/L) uses 72 racks, or 294,912 processors.
To top it all, IBM also offers a three-petaflop version, with 216 racks and 884,736 clusters, according to customer requirements. "There will always be problems that suck up all available computing power. In the supercomputing field you can never have enough processor power, or memory," Staten said

Published: July 14, 2007

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0 Ratings Monday, July 16, 2007
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julio

Amazing

I work with computers and for me it is amazing to check how the speed of the is growing..... Thanks for the article