Supercomputer doubles own record

Gorse Fox has spent his career working with computers, and for a period of time was a specialist in supercomputing techniques and designs. He was impressed by the BBC's information:

The Blue Gene/L supercomputer has broken its own record to achieve more than double the number of calculations it can do a second.

It reached 280.6 teraflops - that is 280.6 trillion calculations a second.

The IBM machine, at the US Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, officially became the most powerful computer on the planet in June.

The article goes on... and again catches the eye with:

In a recent demonstration, Blue Gene/L achieved another first by running a materials science application at 101.5 teraflops, sustained over seven hours on the machine's 131,072 processors.

Errr, how many? Makes GF's PC look a bit feeble.
GF remember that when said machine was conceived, there was concern over the amount of heat it would generate, the vortex that would be created by the hot air as it rose, and the initial installation was expected to weigh more than a 747.

[File under: Computing]