Posted 09/30/08 at 01:45:10 PM by Tom Edwards

Sure, you overclock your rig to the bleeding edge, direct deposit your paycheck to Newegg, and are on the utility company’s watch list because of the blackouts you’ve been known to cause. Yes, you’re a badass power user, but let’s face it, none of your home-built rigs can touch these 10 beasts. So what if half of these machines only exist in the minds of sci-fi writers – their computational prowess transcends the fiction/reality plane, putting our mighty Petaflop age to shame. Peruse this list for inspiration and then get building, you’ve got some catching up to do before you can compete with the real big boys. We won’t settle until our rigs achieve sentience.

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ibm, geek, features, the list, supercomputer, Star Trek, petaflop, deep blue

Posted 09/15/08 at 03:42:05 PM by Paul Lilly

Forget about dual, quad, or even eight-core processors, all of which would prove woefully inadequate next to the system being called Blue Waters. The 200,000 processor core supercomputer got the green light at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, finalizing a contract with IBM to build the what will be the world's first sustained petascale computational system.

For anyone not up on their flops, a petaflop is the equivalent to roughly 1 quadrillion calculations per second, presumably just enough to get a decent framerate out of Crysis. Coupled with the 200,000 processor cores will be more than a petabyte of memory and more than 10 petabytes of disk storage. And yes, that would hold a lot of porn, though Blue Waters will spend its time on scintillating real-world scientific and engineering applications.

Specifically, the National Science Foundations says that Blue Waters will wade into the study of complex processes like the interaction of the Sun's coronal mass ejections with the Earth's magnetosphere and ionosphere. Other examples include the formation and evolution of galaxies in the early universe, understanding the chains of reactions that occur with livings cells, the design of novel materials, and other decidedly nerd topics that have nothing to do with propelling Folding at Home team 11108 ahead of the competition.

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hardware, supercomputer, petascale, petaflop, mother of all folders