IBM's Blue Gene Runs Continuously At 1 Petaflop 231
An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet is reporting on IBM's claim that the Blue Gene/P will continuously operate at more than 1 petaflop. It is actually capable of 3 quadrillion operations a second, or 3 petaflops. IBM claims that at 1 petaflop, Blue Gene/P is performing more operations than a 1.5-mile-high stack of laptops! 'Like the vast majority of other modern supercomputers, Blue Gene/P is composed of several racks of servers lashed together in clusters for large computing tasks, such as running programs that can graphically simulate worldwide weather patterns. Technologies designed for these computers trickle down into the mainstream while conventional technologies and components are used to cut the costs of building these systems. The chip inside Blue Gene/P consists of four PowerPC 450 cores running at 850MHz each. A 2x2 foot circuit board containing 32 of the Blue Gene/P chips can churn out 435 billion operations a second. Thirty two of these boards can be stuffed into a 6-foot-high rack.'"
Hitting 3 petaflops takes an 884,736-processor[s] (Score:5, Funny)
Where's M. Gladstone when you need her! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Hitting 3 petaflops takes an 884,736-processor[ (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Hitting 3 petaflops takes an 884,736-processor[ (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Where's M. Gladstone when you need her! (Score:2, Funny)
Obligatory (IBM only) (Score:4, Funny)
Slashdot needs to be reported! (Score:5, Funny)
Has no one beaten me to it? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:But are they availble on the market (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Has no one beaten me to it? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I'm ignorant. (Score:5, Funny)
They go to large gatherings to hear poor versions of music (with all the ambient noise, I don't understand why they don't just put ona pair of headphones and listen on their PC).
They go to large wooded areas to get "fresh air" and "exercise".
And while these are, admittedly, very bizarre behaviors, these people like to know what the weather is going to be like. To each his own I say.
Re:Hitting 3 petaflops takes an 884,736-processor[ (Score:5, Funny)
From the page/book: ".. There are legends, as you know, that speak of a race of paleface, who concocted robotkind out of a test tube, though anyone with a grain of sense knows this to be a foul lie... For in the Beginning there was naught but Formless Darkness, and in the Darkness, Magneticity, which moved the atoms, and whirling atom struck atom, and Current was thus created, and the First Light... from which the stars where kindled, and then the planets cooled, and in their cores the breath of Scared Statisicality gave rise to microscopic Protomechanoans, which begat Protermechanoids, which begat the Primitive Mechanisms. These could not yet calculate, nor scarcely put two and two together, but thanks to Evolution and Natural Subtraction they soon multiplied and produced Omnistats, which gave birth to the Servostat, the Missing Clink, and from it came our progenitor, Automatus Sapiens..."
CC.
Re:Has no one beaten me to it? (Score:4, Funny)
Weather prediction? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Conversion Rate (Score:3, Funny)
1.5 miles of stacked laptops (Score:4, Funny)
Re:hmm, what is the carbon footprint of that? (Score:5, Funny)
Not enough (Score:3, Funny)
Why is it not based on Cell? (Score:2, Funny)
New unit to measure computing performance (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I'm ignorant. (Score:4, Funny)
Because someone WILL buy them? Apparently you don't understand the concept of sales eh? I think selling you something you actually need is against the salesman code of ethics.
Re:Obligatory.... (Score:1, Funny)
Re:I'm ignorant. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Has no one beaten me to it? (Score:2, Funny)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joke [wikipedia.org]
Re:1.5 miles of stacked laptops (Score:2, Funny)
Re:There, there (Score:5, Funny)
And I hate irony!
Re:what am I missing? 850Mhz = slow? (Score:5, Funny)
vista (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Has no one beaten me to it? (Score:5, Funny)
Instead, imagine a 1.5-mile-high stack of these!
Re:Slashdot needs to be reported! (Score:1, Funny)
Re:1.5 miles of stacked laptops (Score:4, Funny)
I think you are conflating two meanings of arbitrary: while a meter is "arbitrary" in the sense that it's simply a widely used convention, a mile of laptops is "arbitrary" in the sense that it's "retarded".
Re:There, there (Score:3, Funny)