DARPA Announces Plans To Build Fastest Supercomputer Yet
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As of June 2010, the fastest supercomputer on Earth was the Jaguar at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, with a peak around two petaflops. DARPA is preparing to thoroughly shatter that record with its first ever foray into EXAflop computing, and they’ve called in Nvidia to help.
Now, just for the sake of clarification, petaflop computing is currently the fastest known to man, and in storage terms, a petabyte hard drive would store 250000 DVDs. An exabyte hard drive, meanwhile, would ratchet that number up clear over 2.5 million, basically, to 1000 petabytes.
DARPA, along with Nvidia, Cray, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and a slew of universities, is looking to have the project completed within the next four years as part of a measure to address a “crisis in computing”, and I frankly shudder at the thought of what an exaflop computer could actually be used for, and I write science fiction in my downtime. We’re talking about devices that perform a quintillion calculations per second. What do you do with that kind of computing firepower?? You certainly don’t just hang around and play World of Warcraft on it!
But it’ll be a good long while before we see how that particular tech boils out…if they even get it to work.
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The TFTS Team
Exaflops are completely different from exabytes. We will reach exabytes many years before we reach exaflops. BTW, an exabyte is 3 orders of magnitude larger than a terabyte. Your DVD example from 250,000 to 2.5 million is woefully inadequate. Try 250 million.
You shudder to think what an exaflop computer would be used for? Simulating new materials, superconductors, climate change, astrophysical systems, new drugs, smart grids, new fuels… wouldn’t want any of that, now.
Remember, nuclear weapons, what most people shudder at, can be simulated with a few teraflops. We’re well beyond the point where scary stuff can easily be simulated.
one day the power of that computer will fit in the palm of your hand.