Cell/AMD supercomputer...31mil years in one second
"Never say that nothing good comes out of computer games..." This is the opening line from an article posted on embedded.com yesterday about a combo Cell & AMD computer expected to come out around end of 2007 or beginning of 2008.
The main goal for the new supercomputer (Roadrunner) is to combine the power of the IBM cell processor, designed for the Playstation 3, and AMD Opteron CPUs to break the Petaflop barrier. FLOPS is a unit of computer performance measure and is an abbreviation for Floating Point Operations Per Second. A petaflop is 10^15 FLOPS. If it took a person one second to calculate a single FLOP (e.g. 3.14159 * 2.0) what this computer could do in one second would take a human 31,709,791.984 years...wow! ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petaflop )
According to the article, "IBM's Blue Gene/L is currently the fastest supercomputer in the world, peaking at more than[only] 280 teraflops." Quite a large step from where we are now.
As always, here are wikipedia links:
IBM Blue Gene computers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Gene
IBM Cell CPU:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_processor
AMD Opteron:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opteron
Original article: http://www.embedded.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=192700705
Enjoy
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