Tales of the Heliosphere

IBM may have been left behind in the personal computer revolution, but the company rules when it comes to superfast, supercomputers. An IBM devised and built military supercomputer recently set a world record for computing speed by performing over over 1 quadrillion calculations per second, that's a "petaflop" in computerspeak. The computer is built from components originally designed for video game machines. The processing speed feat has helped keep the US in the lead in the international supercomputer speed race.

"By breaking the petaflop barrier sooner than was generally expected, the U.S. supercomputer industry has been able to sustain a pace of continuous performance increases, improving a thousandfold in processing power in 11 years. The next thousandfold goal is the exaflop, which is a quintillion calculations per second, followed by the zettaflop, the yottaflop and the xeraflop."(Here.)

But what about the Fosbury flop? (Here.) No word in the story either about solving the garbage in, garbage out problem.

-tdr

Labels: America, Technology