IBM Breaks Another Computing Barrier
I know this is a bit off the beat (or is it?), but I couldn’t resist. What these guys can do with computers is pretty damn cool. IBM announced they have a new computer that can consistently perform petaflops.
From senior IBM genius Irving Wladawsky Berger’s post on AlwaysOn:
A petaflop is a million billion calculations per second, that is, a 1 followed by fifteen zeros.
That is how many calculations per second Roadrunner can perform. When talking about petaflops, the numbers are so large that it is hard to comprehend what they mean. We are almost into numbers of astronomical dimensions.
The IBM press release used a few analogies to describe the power of Roadrunner, such as “The combined computing power of 100,000 of today’s fastest laptop computers”; and, “It would take the entire population of the earth, – about six billion – each of us working a handheld calculator at the rate of one second per calculation, more than 46 years to do what Roadrunner can do in one day.”