The fastest supercomputer
According to Moore’s Law the number of transistors that can be inexpensively placed on an integrated circuit is increasing exponentially, doubling approximately every two years. This also loosely applies to computer speeds, meaning that the speed of computers generally doubles every two years.
Nowhere is the massive growth in processing power more vividly illustrated than in the supercomputer arena. This however begs the question as to which supercomputers are the fastest.
IBM’s Blue Gene/P is the new king of supercomputers, nearly tripling the performance of its predecessor, Blue Gene/L — currently the world’s fastest computer.
According to IBM the Blue Gene/P Solution scales to operate continuously at speeds exceeding one “petaflop” — or one-quadrillion operations per second.
The system is 100 000 times more powerful than a home PC and can process more operations in one second than the combined power of a stack of laptop computers nearly 1.5 miles high.
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