Sandia and Oak Ridge national labs aim to bust the million trillion calculations-per-second barrier
By Martha Harbison
Posted 02.25.2008 at 4:33 pm
Time was, a teraflop (that's one trillion, or 10^12 floating point operations per second) was just a dream. But the supercomputer ASCI Red nabbed that prize in 1996. Since then, it's been the grueling, relentless march to a petaflop--that's 10^15 flops for those keeping count--a goal achieved by the Riken MDGrape-3 computer in 2006 (some dispute this claim, as the machine is so specialized it can't properly run the benchmark software. For them, we present the latest iteration of IBM's Blue Gene/P, which is purportedly capable of a petaflop as well).
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