Speed Explainer:How Fast things work
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Of Petaflops and FluorinertHow Fast Is The World's Fastest Computer?
Posted Wednesday, Dec. 3, 2008
Supercomputers, long used almost exclusively by rich Western governments for military purposes, are now being put to work in developing nations as well, and for jobs as varied as oil exploration and the management of massively multiplayer online games. How fast is the fastest supercomputer now? And how fast have supercomputers been over the past half-century?
Approximately 50 years ago, the world's fastest supercomputer was the Univac LARC, which ran at a speed of 500,000 floating points operations per second (flops). It was stationed at the U.S. nuclear weapons laboratory in Livermore, Calif., and was used, like most supercomputers, for simulating atomic weapons tests.
Approximately 25 years ago, the world's fastest supercomputer was the Cray-2, which ran at a speed of four gigaflops--or roughly 8,000 times as fast as the LARC. It was owned by the U.S. National Security Administration--which even today is the world's biggest supercomputer consumer--and was used for cryptography, bomb design, weather forecasting, and virtual car-crashing.
Approximately ten years ago, the world's fastest supercomputer was the Intel Asci Red, which ran at a speed of 2.3 teraflops-- about 575 times as fast as the Cray-2. It was owned by the U.S. Department of Energy and used for nuclear stockpile stewardship as well as simulating atomic weapons tests.
Not even Wile E. Coyote could catch today's fastest supercomputer: it is the IBM Roadrunner, which can operate at a speed of over one petaflop--in the neighborhood of 435 times as fast as the Asci Red. That means that it can produce roughly one new result every one-thousandth of one-billionth of a second. It is stationed at the U.S. nuclear laboratory in Los Alamos, N.M. and used for nuclear stockpile stewardship.
In the future, the leaps in speed from old supercomputers to new ones are expected to shorten. Increasing the sheer number of central processing units (CPUs) in a computer will not fix this, because, according to Amdahl's Law, the number of processors in a computer does not have a linear relationship to its speed.
Not all supercomputers are built alike. The LARC was housed in its own concrete building, and was so large that it required five eighteen-wheelers to bring its parts to California from Philadelphia. The Cray-2's parts, by contrast, sat in a liquid called fluorinert.
Personal computing has come a long way, but does not approach the speed of the contemporaneous supercomputer. An average 8-CPU Apple laptop runs at 8 gigaflops, or the speed of the fastest supercomputer of fifteen years ago. Gaming machines tend to be faster: a Playstation 3 runs at around 200 gigaflops.
But what you really want to know: Apple or PC? Actually, most supercomputers today, including the Roadrunner, operate on Linux.
Explainer thanks Dag Spicer of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.
