Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Acceptance testing a super computer

Imagine a new supercomputer that is fifteen times as fast as its predecessor. Imagine it was dedicated to looking at environmentally friendly issues such as storing hydrogen or climate change. How much do you think it should cost.

Well since this super computer exists you don't have to imagine this. The answer is $21.4M. It can run over 160 trillion calculations a second. That's 86,400,000,000,000,000.00 calculations every day. Fast enough to get it into the list of the fifty fastest computers in the world.

Its a bespoke HP computer and its undergoing acceptance testing by researches at the EMSL. Now that is one acceptance test I'd like to be on. I wonder how you get to be a researcher who tests at EMSL.

1 comment:

Sean Brady said...

I found this article to be very interesting! Thank you for sharing this with us!