[IP] Exaflop? Cool.

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

________________________________________
From: Randall [rvh40@insightbb.com]
Sent: Thursday, February 21, 2008 10:35 PM
To: David Farber; Dewayne Hendricks; johnmacsgroup@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Exaflop?  Cool.

http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/one-million-trillion-flops-second-
targeted-new-institute-15534.html


One million trillion ‘flops’ per second targeted by new institute


Preparing groundwork for an exascale computer is the mission of the
new Institute for Advanced Architectures, launched jointly at Sandia
and Oak Ridge national laboratories.

An exaflop is a thousand times faster than a petaflop, itself a
thousand times faster than a teraflop. Teraflop computers —the first
was developed 10 years ago at Sandia — currently are the state of the
art.   They do trillions of calculations a second. Exaflop computers
would perform a million trillion calculations per second.

The idea behind the institute —under consideration for a year and a
half prior to its opening — is “to close critical gaps between
theoretical peak performance and actual performance on current
supercomputers,” says Sandia project lead Sudip Dosanjh. “We believe
this can be done by developing novel and innovative computer
architectures.”

Ultrafast supercomputers improve detection of real-world conditions
by helping researchers more closely examine the interactions of
larger numbers of particles over time periods divided into smaller
segments.

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