Supercomputers Break Petaflop Barrier, Transforming Science

Supercomputers Break Petaflop Barrier, Transforming Science

blog.wired.com

When the Top 500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers was announced at the international supercomputing conference in Austin, Texas, on Monday, IBM had barely managed to cling to the top spot, fending off a challenge from Cray. But both competitors broke petaflop speeds, performing 1.105 and 1.059 quadrillion floating-point calculations per second, the first two computers to do so.

These computers aren't just faster than those they pushed further down the list, they will enable a new class of science that wasn't possible before. As recently described in Wired magazine, these massive number crunchers will push simulation to the forefront of science.

(visit the link for the full news article)

Wow Look at this one the ramifications of this if far beyond what us geeks have hoped for this will change the world. This will change the way we think and use computers.Of course there is always a downside i just haven't found it yet.
I don't know how many of us geeks are on the ATS forum but if you are wait till you check out the specs on this thing they could make any gamer have wood.

blog.wired.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

Too bad they are in the hands of Corporations who have absolutely no intention of helping out mankind.

Sure - market forces do make sure that profit motive and humkan needs do intersect in many areas - but wouldn't it be nice to have civilian Jason groups who actually used these resources for advancing and empowering Human civilization.

A transformation of society is going to be essential if we are to truley survive - and thrive - as a species going forward.

The Second Rennisance of man can not begin soon enough!

Just to put things into perspective for people, here are a few of these absolutely amazing specifications for the Cray XT..

Type: The Cray XT computer is a distributed-memory massively parallel MIMD supercomputer.

What Is It: A petaflop computer can process one quadrillion floating-point calculations per second. That's 1,000,000,000,000,000 calculations every second.

Processors: 182,000 AMD quad-core Opterons, running at 2.3 gigahertz.

Memory Capacity: 362 terabytes of memory (with 578 terabytes per second of memory bandwidth).

OS: Cray XTs run UNICOS/lc, a flavor of Unix with networking and file-system enhancements from BSD.

They even said it is phenomenal for gaming! (lol, sarcasm, but this computer obviously is quite the rig.)

In reality, the projects this beast will be working on include, from the NCSS website..

Library of Flames Illuminates Design of Advanced Combustion Devices

Insight into how flames stabilize, extinguish, and reignite may spawn new predictive models that guide the design of engines that burn less fuel and generate fewer pollutants and greenhouse gases.

Invisible Means of Support

A team led by astrophysicist Piero Madau of the University of California-Santa Cruz (UCSC) has given us a glimpse into the invisible world of dark matter, performing the largest computer simulation ever of dark matter evolving in a galaxy such as the Milky Way. The results of their findings appear in the August 7 issue of the journal Nature.

And a plethora of other projects that will invariably lead to huge scientific advancements.

I can only imagine what things will be like ten years from now, where petaflop computing will be accessible to larger markets able to perform their own research.

How true on the Renaissance it has been needed since the 90's but im not sure if a computer revolution is going to help the economy we will just be able to computer the debt with this computer as fast as it goes up lol.