U.S. DOE now computes faster than anyone with Jaguar

William Atkins
Tuesday, 11 November 2008 22:35

Your IT - Home IT

The IBM Roadrunner held the world’s fastest record since June of 2008, according to the TOP500 list, which lists the world’s most powerful and fastest processing supercomputers.

With speeds growing constantly, the exaFLOPS (10 petaFLOPS) supercomputer is expected to exist by 2019. [InfoWorld: “IBM breaks petaflop barrier”]

And, Erik P. DeBenedictis (Sandia National Laboratories) predicts that the zettaFLOPS (100 petaFLOPS) supercomputer will be running around the year 2030.

Such a supercomputer will be able to model accurately the Earth’s global weather over a two-week span of time. [Portal: “Reversible logic for supercomputing”]

The word "supercomputer" is considered to have been first used in 1929 by The New York World newspaper. It was talking about a tabulating machine that the International Business Machine Corporation (IBM) had built for Columbia University in New York City.

The Columbia Difference Tabulating Machine, running in 1931, wss able to read 150 paper punch cards per minute.

The Columbia website mentions that at the time Dr. Ben Wood stated, "These new machines will be a tremendous boon to research ... making statistical procedure more accurate, much faster and less expensive."

In about eighty years, we've come quite a long way with computers, but the future will hold much, much more for us, for we are still in our infancy.