Petaflops

An article in the SF New Mexican listed the five fastest supercomputers in the world.
As of November the top three were:
.BlueGene, 0.4782 petaflops
JUGENE, 0.163 petaflops
EncantoSGI Alix ICE8200, 0.1269 petaflops

And #3 is hosted in New Mexico by New Mexico Computing Applications Center.

There is more than one Roadrunner in New Mexico, or will be soon. The Roadrunner computer, currently housed in Poughkeepsie, NY, will be moved to Los Alamos next month. This hummer has an interconnecting system occupying 6,000 square feet with 57 miles of fiber optics and weighs 500,000 pounds. The computer consists of 6,848 dual-core computer chips and 12,960 cell engines and it has 80 terabytes of memory housed in 288 connected refrigerator-sized racks.

Reporter Sue Vorenberg noted, “Breaking the petaflop barrier is a major milestone in supercomputing world.” Andy White, Roadrunner project manager at Los Alamos said on bringing Roadrunner to Los Alamos, “I think it’s going to change the physics we’re capable of doing.” The New Mexican noted, “And oddly enough the breakthrough was made possible in part because of the video game industry” which spent $400 million to develop this chip now used by the Roadrunner.

I have to imagine that the speed is beyond comprehension, especially because I have no idea how to rate a petaflop versus any other kind of flop.
I am aware of teraflops, but could not personally name any other computer “flops” of that nature.

For more information watch the LANL YouTube video:

Written by PCH at Main