12-06-2009, 04:56 AM
I thought about posting this in the hardware section, but seeing as these
are just theoretical at the present moment, I thought that I had better place this here.
Apologies if it's not in the correct place though.
20 petaFLOPS per second, which is just a phenomenally large number.
Although it supposedly won't be completed until 2012 though.
# Sequoia, a proposed super computer built by IBM for the National Nuclear Security Administration will be completed, reaching a peak performance of 20 Petaflops.
# Pleiades, a proposed super computer built by Intel and SGI for NASA's Ames Research Center, will be completed, reaching a peak performance of 10 Petaflops (10 quadrillion floating point operations per second).
It seems that some fairly recent PC processors (2008) are capable of reaching from 70 GFLOPs upwards, although GPU's can reach 1000 and above.
I'm trying to imagine how powerful 20 quadrillion floating point operations per second would be
in terms of rendering a video file or 3D graphics still, that may take around 2-4 minutes on an average PC?
A few seconds maybe? I wonder if anybody knows what could be done with 20 PetaFLOPS on an average home PC? Maybe the PC would boot up in a few seconds or something?
According to WiKi, the 4 petaFLOPS barrier has been crossed by primarily enabling the cumulative effort of a vast array of PlayStation 3, CPU, and powerful GPU units,
so I suppose that one PC with that degree of processing power would be totally awesome and 20, well it speaks for itself
but I somehow doubt that home users will be allowed that degree of processing power for quite some time if at all, in 5-10 years maybe, but that's just a guess.
Some further info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS
are just theoretical at the present moment, I thought that I had better place this here.
Apologies if it's not in the correct place though.
20 petaFLOPS per second, which is just a phenomenally large number.
Although it supposedly won't be completed until 2012 though.
# Sequoia, a proposed super computer built by IBM for the National Nuclear Security Administration will be completed, reaching a peak performance of 20 Petaflops.
# Pleiades, a proposed super computer built by Intel and SGI for NASA's Ames Research Center, will be completed, reaching a peak performance of 10 Petaflops (10 quadrillion floating point operations per second).
It seems that some fairly recent PC processors (2008) are capable of reaching from 70 GFLOPs upwards, although GPU's can reach 1000 and above.
I'm trying to imagine how powerful 20 quadrillion floating point operations per second would be
in terms of rendering a video file or 3D graphics still, that may take around 2-4 minutes on an average PC?
A few seconds maybe? I wonder if anybody knows what could be done with 20 PetaFLOPS on an average home PC? Maybe the PC would boot up in a few seconds or something?
According to WiKi, the 4 petaFLOPS barrier has been crossed by primarily enabling the cumulative effort of a vast array of PlayStation 3, CPU, and powerful GPU units,
so I suppose that one PC with that degree of processing power would be totally awesome and 20, well it speaks for itself
but I somehow doubt that home users will be allowed that degree of processing power for quite some time if at all, in 5-10 years maybe, but that's just a guess.
Some further info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS
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