Great big flops!
For the last two years, the Japanese have thumbed their noses at the rest of the world, boasting the fastest supercomputer with an observed speed of 35.86 teraflops. (A teraflop is equal to one trillion floating point operations per second.) The NEC Earth Simulator, dedicated to climate modeling and simulating seismic activity, is now facing two challengers when the Top 500 Supercomputer list comes out next week.

The first is Nasa's Columbia supercomputer based at its Ames Research Center in California. Its mission is to model flight missions, climate research, and aerospace engineering. The Linux-based machine was reported to have reached a top speed of 42.7 teraflops in October.

But the big news is IBM's prototype Blue Gene/L, being developed for the Livermore Labs. It currently runs at 70.72 teraflops --but they're still tweaking it. When the final version is finished, it should hit 360 teraflops without breaking a sweat.

But wait, there's more... IBM's senior vice president of technology and manufacturing, Nick Donofrio, believes that by 2006, Blue Gene will be capable of petaflop computing. (I'm running out of fingers here, but that's 1,000 teraflops.) IBM says that a computer that powerful should be able to take on one of the most complex problems around, protein folding. You and I know that at least one workstation will be playing Colossal Cave...


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