Thursday, July 05, 2007

Race for teraflops ..or Petaflops .. ??

The 2007 bi-annual list of the world's top 500 supercomputers finds no mention from India.

The IBM machine Bluegene/L at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California tops the list with a speed of 280.6 teraflops. The Jaguar Cray XT4 at the Oak Ridge National Maboratory is a far second at 101.7 teraflops. IBM/HP Machines finds mention in the top 500 from within India, but no indigenous development.

CDAC by 2010 is planning to get machines working at 1 Petaflop, 1e 1000 teraflops( 1000 trillion or 1 x 10 to the power 15 floating point operations per second..

The IBM petaflop machine BG/P with 1 petaflop will be out in 2008.

At present speeds it will take almost 100,000 PCs to catch up with one of these 1 petaflop machines.

Single chip multiple core machines in the petaflop ranges will be available in 2010 with about 150,000 to 500,000 cores. The real challenge is to develop system software and scalable algorithms which can match these speeds..

The MDGRAPE - 3 from Japan already clocked 1 petaflop in June 2006 but being a special purpose computer does not find mention in the top 500 supercomps in 2007.

Your handheld calculator operates at 10 flops.. oops !!

info courtesy The Hindu, 5 July 07 + http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS

george..

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