The Worlds Fastest Computers
While there is some controversy regarding the fastest computers in the world, the speed at which any of these machines process information would be a foreign concept a decade ago. To put things into perspective, a regular PC processes about 100 million instructions per second. The human brain, the ultimate computing device is estimated to process 10 quadrillion instructions per second. So who is leading the race on supercomputing:
- BlueGene/L System – IBM (and the Department of Energy) – 478.2 Teraflops per second.
- BluGene/P System – IBM – 167.3 Teraflops per second
- SGI System (based on an Altix ICE 8200 model) – 126.9 TFlop/s
So what is a TFlop anyway? A teraflop is a measure of computer speed equivalent to one trillion operations per second. In order to rank for the list usually released at the international conference on high performance computing, the systems must run a software to track the speed. It is reported that a supercomputer called MDGrape-3, built by RIKEN, a Japanese company clocked in at 1 petraflop, or 1 quadrillion operations per second, but could not run the software to make the rankings. Needless to say it will likely be in our lifetime that we see a computer processing as fast as the human brain. What will companies like Verzion DSL offer in their internet specials when this becomes a reality?
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