IBM has a 91 TeraFlop computer

[lightwave]

Would you like one of these on your desktop ?

 

Earlier this week, IBM (NYSE: IBM - News) unveiled its latest and greatest supercomputer. The 91-teraflop monster, dubbed "Watson Blue Gene," is capable of cranking out a mind-blowing 91 trillion calculations per second. This ultra-powerful -- yet remarkably affordable, practical, and accessible -- computing tool is likely to give IBM a significant competitive advantage over competitors such as Affymetrix (Nasdaq: AFFX - News), Intel (Nasdaq: INTC - News), and General Electric (NYSE: GE - News) in the life sciences, information technology, and material sciences sectors.

 

IBM officials are confident that they'll be able to develop a successor capable of a 1 petaflop performance level by the end of the decade. That's 1 quadrillion calculations per second -- 10 times as powerful as Watson Blue Gene.

 

http://news.yahoo.com/s/fool/20050617/bs_fool_fool/111903931827;_ylt=AtgSlcORRLSVEnePChhelZojtBAF;_ylu=X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNlYwMlJVRPUCUl

 

The word 'tera' originates from the Greek word teras meaning 'monster'.

[rakuenso]

how many calcuations can a 1.7 ghz processor do?

[insane_alien]

1.7billion(short scale) per second thats 1.7*10^9 per second or 1700000000 calculations per second

[rakuenso]

meh its only 5000 times faster than my laptop ;P

[AzurePhoenix]

Big deal. Me? I swear by my great-grandfather's abacus, and to this day, it works like new. Let's see how this super computer runs after eighty years

[Kygron]

1.7billion(short scale) per second thats 1.7*10^9 per second or 1700000000 calculations per second

 

You're using two different scales to relate them. 1 flop = 1 floating point operation per second, like 4.4365264E-63 * 2.54626256E31. 1 hz = one clock pulse per second. You can do different ammounts of calculation in a clock pulse depending on the size/complexity of the computer. This is why most companies don't use the hz numbers any more. I seriously doubt the gene machine is any more than 5ghz or so.

 

But aside from that I don't know how they relate, you'll have to look it up

[calbiterol]

Kygron, your signature is bloody confusing.

 

That said, 91 teraflops?! Wow.

With a petaflop on the way? I'm floored.

[JohnB]

Makes perfect sense to me.

 

But then, I can stand in the shadow of a corkscrew.

[Martin]

Kyrgon signature:

 

Some people have gone beyond correct, even becoming helpfull;

I'd love to be helpfull, but sometimes can't make it to correct;

Is there a way to be helpfull, while at the same time asking for help?

Makes perfect sense to me.

 

 

me too,

It reminds me of the style of responding that the volunteer experts had on a different science board a few years back---that really threw me off when I first encountered it.

 

some newbie would ask a question showing basic confusion

and would get back a precise, brief response that was correct

but didn't connect to the guy's confusion

 

the response would be correct, strictly speaking, but completely unhelpful because the questioner wouldnt have any handle on it, so it would mostly just shut him up. Now that i think of it that's not always a bad idea.

 

Kygron sig speaks to that. Personally I wouldnt use those words to say it, but the meaning comes across clearly.

[Kygron]

I wrote it as a personal reminder of the style of writing I need to be using on this forum. I'm good at understanding, but have little precise technical knowledge. When I state someting as fact someone will tell me I'm wrong and I'll be frustrated. When I try and point someone in the right direction someone always comes by with a different perspective and sees me pointing backwards. My only solution was to ask a question, that when answered, leads to a realization about the original problem. Then I sit back and let someone else get frustrated

 

for example:

You're using two different scales to relate them. 1 flop = 1 floating point operation per second' date=' like 4.4365264E-63 * 2.54626256E31. 1 hz = one clock pulse per second. You can do different ammounts of calculation in a clock pulse depending on the size/complexity of the computer. This is why most companies don't use the hz numbers any more. I seriously doubt the gene machine is any more than 5ghz or so.

[/quote']

SHOULD have been written:

 

So why did they say teraflop when it's easier to say ghz?

 

Unfortunatly I never see my sig until AFTER I post, so I have alot of trouble following through on my decided style.

[Molotov]

I seriously doubt the gene machine is any more than 5ghz or so.

 

 

More than likely its just a bunch of relatively low hz processors running in parallel.

[Etacude]

Kygron' date=' your signature is bloody confusing.

 

That said, 91 teraflops?! Wow.

With a petaflop on the way? I'm floored.[/quote']

 

That said, the speed may sound astounding to many people. However, based on the existing computational software and techniques, the real bottle neck to do serious and useful calculations are the computational speed of computers.

 

For instance, it is still impractical to do certain complex molecular biological processes even with the use of Blue Gene, although these IBM machines were designed specifically to target these problems.