Major Computer Companies Compete for Speed
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Everything in today’s society is about being quick. Faster is better and speed is the goal, even when it comes to the most sophisticated computers on the globe. The best supercomputers aren’t the biggest or the smallest, the most user-friendly or feature-rich. The best supercomputers boast the one thing everyone wants -- speed.
The Petaflop Barrier
Today, the world has supercomputers, which are more than a cut above the desktop you use to print out family photos and surf the Web. These machines are known for one attribute: speed. What matters is not the size and shape, but the amount of calculations supercomputers can do in a single second. Computer speed, like the speed of the human brain, is measured in petaflops.
But, what’s a petaflop? This complicated word really signifies a complicated theory, because a petaflop doesn’t actually exist in the truest sense of the word. A petaflop is a theoretical measure of speed which equals approximately one thousand trillion floating point operations per second (FLOPS).
A computer which can operate faster than the human brain is one which is capable of breaking the petaflop barrier. How fast would a computer have to be to break this barrier? A supercomputer capable of breaking the petaflop barrier would have to be able to complete one quadrillion calculations per second. The manufacturer which can create the fastest computer known to man can claim all the bragging rights that go with this distinction. So…which computer company is behind the world’s fastest computing device?
Supercomputers
IBM not only broke the petaflop barrier with its newest supercomputer, but left this milestone completely in the dust. Whimsically named the Roadrunner, it was designed for a peak performance of 1.7 petaflops, and achieved 1.026 on May 25, 2008. This one-of-a-kind machine is twice as fast as the fastest supercomputer that came before it. This makes Roadrunner the most powerful supercomputer in a world made for fast, extremely powerful supercomputers.
IBM is not alone in trying to demolish the petaflop barrier with a new, highly impressive supercomputer. Well-known names like Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Cray and Silicon Graphics are all hoping to find new esteem in the supercomputer market, and each is said to be working on some petaflop barrier-smashing of their own.
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