Say hello to the Blue Gene/Q, or if you're looking for something a bit less intimidating, "Mira." That's IBM's latest and greatest concoction, a ten-petaflop supercomputer capable of running programs at ten quadrillion calculations a second. Hard to say who'd win between Mira and Watson, of course, but there's absolutely no question who'd come out on top if Mira were pitted against her predecessor Intrepid (hint: Mira's 20x faster). To put this all in perspective, IBM's chiming in with this:
Mira's next stop is at the US Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory, where it'll be used to tackle 16 projects in particular that were drawn from a pool of proposals to gain access to her capabilities. We're told that these include a range of initiatives -- from reducing energy inefficiencies in transportation and developing advanced engine designs to spurring advances in energy technologies -- and in time, it could lead to exascale-class computers "that will be faster than petascale-class computers by a factor of a thousand.""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."
Is it wrong that I'm a little bit scared.
ReplyDeleteis that what it looks like? if so that is very very cool. imagine having one of those in ur house..
ReplyDeleteJesus, that's insanely fast.
ReplyDeletewow. so, any plans to steal it? i could use one of those for gaming...maybe overclock it a little...
ReplyDeleteThis is just phenomenal. In theory, one of those could be a personal computer one day, but I doubt they'll give the public that kind of processing power.
ReplyDeleteThe future of computing is always exciting for me. :)
This is pretty intense, thanks for the post. Good blog too, following.
ReplyDeleteAwesome job IBM, too bad you don't make laptops anymore...(lenovo doesnt count!)
ReplyDeleteWow, it's kinda small for ten petaflops, right?
ReplyDeleteThat's a real powerhouse right there.
ReplyDeleteSo when is Mira going on Jeopardy?
ReplyDeletegood news for me! my computer is really outdated and need a quicker one. hopefully this will push less new but still faster technology down the price line.
ReplyDeletewhen i read this, i have to think about a quote from bill gates. it was somethin like "3-5 super computers will fit any calculation of the world".
ReplyDelete10 petaflops?? wow
ReplyDeleteI'm interested how much electricity does this (giga) baby use :D
ReplyDelete