Friday, March 11, 2005

World's most powerful computer doubles in size

According to InfoWorld, the world's most powerful computer (housed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, and known as "Blue Gene/L") has recently been doubled in size, from 32,000 processors to 64,000. When the bugs are worked out, they're expecting it to hit speeds of 150 teraflops (or trillions of calculations per second), if you can even imagine. And what's more, the entire thing is only the size of half a tennis court, and was specifically designed to use four times less electricity than the usual supercomputer in existence. And what's even more, they're not even done - this is merely phase 2 of a three-phase improvement, which will supposedly leave the computer at the end with 130,000 processors, and a theoretical top speed of 360 teraflops. Now, if it could only get Flash-based websites to run without crashing...