Petaflop Supercomputer
Are supercomputers going to figure out the meaning of life anytime soon? OK, that might be a little too much to ask, even from a supercomputer. How about Matrix-like environments? Now this idea seems more plausible when we think about IBM’s Roadrunner project.
Don Grice, the chief engineer on IBM's Roadrunner, told Computer World: "We will break the petascale barrier. The only unknown for me will be what day it is. Griece compares the breaking of the petaflop barrier to the first step on the Moon. Most of the current supercomputers measure performance in hundreds of teraflops, but there’s a tight race between IBM along with Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Cray and Silicon Graphics in order to determine which one would be the first to bust through to the petascale.
Roadrunner is set to go online later this year at the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory, and will be able to compute enormous data strings, aiding in the research for nuclear weapons systems, climate changes and human genetics. Roadrunner has its components scattered over 6,000 square feet, weighs 500,000 pounds total, and uses 57 miles of cable, requiring 3.9 megawatts of power per hour.
The Roadrunner sure looks like some devourer of energy. Build several of these and we’ll be inside the Matrix in no time. Or maybe they’ll just want to figure out the mind of God?
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