Computers break the exaflop barrier
An exaflop is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 (a million trillion, or a quintillion) calculations per second. The world's top supercomputers are now reaching this speed, which is a 1000-fold improvement over those of a decade earlier.* This exponential growth will continue for many years to come.
Personal computers are becoming ever more compact and sophisticated, with laptops and other mobile devices far outnumbering desktops.* Physical hard drives have become almost redundant, with most storage now done online using "virtual drives" in remote servers, aided by the growth in broadband speeds and wireless communications.
Web applications have reached startling levels of sophistication, especially where search engines are concerned. These not only find keywords in a search, but also interpret the context and semantics of the request, often with voice recognition software. Natural language processing had already begun to emerge some years earlier with Siri and other such tools. This form of AI, acting like a personal assistant, is now even more powerful and versatile.* Users can ask highly specific questions and receive detailed answers customised to their exact requirements.
2. The one with a quarter of a million cores: Jaguar
Jaguar, a Cray XT5-HE supercomputer located at the US Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has quite a few cores: TOP500 says there are nearly a quarter of a million since its most recent upgrade.
Jaguar's 224,162 cores come courtesy of a whole bunch of six-core Opteron chips, and its performance is a hefty 1.76 petaflops. Oak Ridge says it's the world's fastest supercomputer for unclassified research.
9. The ultimate DVD ripper: JUGENE
Germany's supercomputer was designed for low power consumption as well as high performance, and it's been involved in some interesting projects - including trying to work out how DVDs work. According toScientific Computing, it's improving our understanding of "the processes involved in writing and erasing a DVD", which should lead to storage media that works better, lasts longer and provides higher capacity.
DCS CEO
Derlich Herman
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