I was sitting in class today and Professor Drake was talking about supercomputers. I have dealt with many different computers in my life but have never learned much about supercomputers. It was astonishing to find out how much these computers can handle so I decided to look into the company who has bragging rights over the fastest computer in the world, Cray Inc..
Cray was founded in 1987 under the name of the Tera Computer Company. They then changed their name when they acquired the Cray Research of Silicon Graphics in 2000. Cray is the company that created the fastest computer in the world, the Cray XT5, or also known as "Jaguar." Jaguar is the first computer to exceed a petaflops in performance. Flops stand for floating point operations per second. The Jaguar system can theoretically perform at 2.3 petaflops per second with almost a quarter of a million core processors. Jaguar can be found at the National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Cray has made a name for themselves as being on the brink of technology, but how much does one of these systems cost? The starting price on a Cray XT6m supercomputer is about $500,000. These computers are for workloads that require only 500-5,000 cores of processing power. However, the Jaguar system is worth millions.
It is amazing how advanced computers have become. Before I heard of supercomputers I did not even know of the term peta-. It is only a matter of time that tera- and peta- will become household terms like mega- and giga-. Plus, I thought the quad-core processing technology was impressive until I heard of the 250,000 processors it takes to run Jaguar. That is just simply outrageous.
WHOA! Its insane to think about a computer that can process that fast!! I think you're exactly right, that its only a matter of time before tera and peta are household terms! maybe one day it'll be even faster!
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