MidnightCall Magazine
News From Israel MagazineGovernment Unveils World’s Fastest Computer
Scientists unveiled the world’s fastest supercomputer, a $100 million machine that for the first time has performed 1,000 trillion calculations per second in a sustained exercise.
The technology breakthrough was accomplished by engineers from the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the IBM Corp. on a computer to be used primarily on nuclear weapons work, including simulating nuclear explosions.
The computer, named Roadrunner, is twice as fast as IBM’s Blue Gene system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which itself is three times faster than any of the world’s other supercomputers, according to IBM.
“The computer is a speed demon. It will allow us to solve tremendous problems,” said Thomas D’Agostino, head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees nuclear weapons research and maintains the warhead stockpile.
To put the computer’s speed in perspective, if every one of the 6 billion people on earth used a hand-held computer and worked 24 hours a day, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner computer can do in a single day.
The interconnecting system occupies 6,000 square feet with 57 miles of fiber optics and weighs 500,000 pounds. Although made from commercial parts, the computer consists of 6,948 dual-core computer chips and 12,960 cell engines, and it has 80 terabytes of memory.
The Roadrunner computer, now housed at the IBM research laboratory in Poughkeepsie, New York, will be moved to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
Along with other supercomputers, it will be key “to assure the safety and security of our (weapons) stockpile,” said D’Agostino. With its extraordinary speed it will be able to simulate the performances of a warhead and help weapons scientists track warhead aging, he said.
Anastasio said the computer, in its unclassified applications, is expected to be used not only by Los Alamos scientists but others as well. He said there can be broad applications such as helping to develop a vaccine for the HIV virus, examine the chemistry in the production of cellulosic ethanol, or to understand the origins of the universe.
And Turek said the computer represents still another breakthrough, particularly important in these days of expensive energy: it is an energy miser compared with other supercomputers, performing 365 million calculations for every watt of electricity used.
-cnn.com, 9 June 2008
Computer technology continues to leapfrog unabated, faster and faster, with virtually unlimited memory capacity. It becomes easy to imagine that such a system can be utilized for total control of all people. How long this computer will hold the title for the world’s fastest is just a matter of time. There is no turning back; man will be able to bring about peace based on his own merits. In other words, man is manufacturing his own god, and ultimately, his own destruction.
(3329)