May 12 2008 / by juldrich
Category: Business & Work Year: 2011 Rating: 11 Hot
By Jack Uldrich
Cross-posted from www.jumpthecurve.net
ComputerWorld recently reported that NASA’s latest supercomputer will be capable of
performing
10 quadrillion floating-point operations per second. 
Now, 10 quadrillion is a rather large number. In fact, it is so
large that it can be difficult to wrap one’s brain around. Let me
try to put it in some perspective for you.
A few year’s ago I wrote an article about an IBM supercomputer capable of 70 trillion calculations
per second. As a way of helping the reader grasp the enormity of
the number, I noted that if that person had to perform a comparable
number of calculations but only had a hand-held calculator it would
take that person 60 million years to do what that supercomputer can
now do in a single second. (And this is assuming the person could
work around the clock 24/7/365.)
Today, supercomputers are performing 1 quadrillion calculations
per seconds. So, if you follow the analogy, it would now take
roughly 800 million years to perform a comparable number of
calculations. And, if you extend the analogy out to 10 quadrillion
calculations, it will soon take a person 8 billion years to do the
same chore. (cont.)
All this might sound rather pedantic, but if you want to
understand why the future is speeding
up you should take this analogy to heart because what these
supercomputers are really doing is augmenting human intelligence
and accelerating change. For example, supercomputers are being used
to develop new nanomaterials, new drugs and next-generation
airplanes and spacecraft. More important, they are helping
scientists and researchers gain a better understanding complex
systems such as the human body; the natural environment; and the
universe itself.
Why, these supercomputers are even being used to develop the
next generation of supercomputers which will soon be capable of 100
quadrillion calculations! (Pessimists will argue that such a
supercomputer would cost billions to build and would need a massive
amount of energy to operate—and they would be right. However,
according to this article, smart researchers at the Berkeley Lab
are trying to change the supercomputing paradigm by using larger
numbers of small processor cores which have the advantage of being
both less expensive and less energy intensive.)
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