US Set To Retake Fastest Supercomputer Slot With IBM's Mira

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I warned them. I warned the Chinese that they should sleep with one eye open when it comes to supercomputer speed, because once the Tianhe-1A took over the top slot from the US Department of Energy’s Jaguar, it was likely to be a matter of time until a new monster got wheeled out and sent the Chinese supercomputer packing. And that day has arrived with the US Department of Energy’s newest thyroidal monster, the Mira.

Now, it’s not a done deal yet, but the Tianhe-1A’s death warrant has been signed and sealed. It’s just a matter of delivery as the Mira won’t be online until 2012. But once it is, the new mark to beat will go from Tianhe-1A’s 2.51 petaflops to the new mark of fully ten petaflops, as expressed by the Mira.

That gets us a nice jump closer to the wild and crazy world of exaflop computing, which has been forecast for quite some time now, though assuming Moore’s Law applies (which is somewhat shaky at best, and even Moore’s Law’s inventor says it’s a dead issue now), we’ll still need better than a decade to pull off exaflops.

What can you do with ten petaflops, you wonder? Turns out, a lot of exciting things–you can simulate the effects of medicine on a human heart, and the process goes from two years of computer time clear down to two days. Even better, you can predict weather accurately to the 100 meter range with a 20 petaflop system, so progress on this front will be very appreciated, especially considering what all the weather’s been up to lately all over the planet.

Just for a bit more reference, IBM has a real mind-blower in terms of comparison:

“If every man, woman and child in the United States performed one calculation each second, it would take them almost a year to do as many calculations as Mira will do in one second.”

I don’t know about you, but that sounds pretty good to me. I’d love to see what comes out of those massive computing cycles.