Fujitsu's New Supercomputer Will Handle Ten Petaflops By 2012

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I love supercomputer news, folks–it’s always at least a little humbling to see what the upper range in computing is. Oh, I know we’ll likely never see a home computer that can handle even one petaflop, let alone ten, but it’s nice to wonder all the same.

After all, there’s more RAM in some cell phones these days than in the computers that shot astronauts to the moon, so who knows where we’re going? But what we do know is that the folks out at Fujitsu are putting a lot of juice into their K supercomputer.

How much juice, you wonder? Ten petaflops’ worth, or ten quadrillion operations per second. The current top, pictured above and known as Cray’s Jaguar, currently measures in at 1.75 petaflops. It’s set to have 80,000 octuple-core 2.2GHz CPUs, all of which are located in 800 racks. That’s 640,000 processing cores, in case you wanted to see the punchline.

And who’s getting this wonder? It’s Japan’s Riken Research Institute, and they look to have it online by 2012. Amazing, isn’t it?