Today Vs. Ages ago
Posted by adityavempaty on June 18, 2008
What if we could not blog like we did today or share information between people as we have become accustomed to over the internet? This was a reality (one which I would not know how to live without), but all this was made possible with the creation of :
Kinda makes you think huh?
“This is the first known photograph of the great grandfather of modern digital computers – a room sized, one ton jumble of wiring, valves and racks that was 640 million times less powerful than its descendant, the pocket-sized iPod.”
Imagine an iPod, an iPod is more powerful then whats pictured above. Now lets look at what was announced today by IBM: IBM’s Roadrunner is the worlds Fastest and most efficient computer to date:
The fastest supercomputer in the world is also one of the most energy efficient. That’s according to the Top500 supercomputers list, to be released Wednesday at the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany.
What more could we want; technology improving by leaps and bounds while doing it efficiently. Just take a look at where the fastest computer was last year in comparison to this years:
This year, the 31st time the list has been put together, the honor of top supercomputer goes to IBM’s Roadrunner, which is housed at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory. It’s the first system to reach 1.026 petaflops (1 petaflop is equal to a quadrillion, or one thousand trillion, calculations per second).
For perspective, last year’s most powerful computer, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s BlueGene/L–also made by IBM–reached 208.6 teraflops. This year that computer ranked No. 2, reaching a max processing speed of 478.2 teraflops.
The fun fact of all this is that these computer are baised on the same archtecture as the IBM processors used in the PS3. Imagine that, a supercomputer uses the same processors as your good old gaming system. Thoughts comments?
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Michael said
Like a tennis player, lot of muscles and speed does not guarantee optimal performance. Roadrunner’s bottleneck is disk I/O, especially with databases where processing power is not so important as proper database design and right indexes.
The most important thing is not speed but ability to retrieve and match data in optimal and most efficient fashion.
Same of tennis players are fast and fit, but their bottleneck is their brain inability to store and retrieve data from somewhere in their brain (external memory i.e. disk) to be able to bring optimal decision.