IBM’s Blue Gene passes petaflop milestone: News - Hardware - ZDNet Australia

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IBM’s Blue Gene passes petaflop milestone: News - Hardware - ZDNet Australia
IBM has devised a new Blue Gene supercomputer — the Blue Gene/P — that will be capable of processing more than 3 quadrillion operations a second, or 3 petaflops, a possible record. Blue Gene/P is designed to continuously operate at more than 1 petaflop in real-world situations.

Blue Gene/P marks a significant milestone in computing. Last November, the Blue Gene/L was ranked as the most powerful computer on the planet: it topped out at 280 teraflops, or 280 trillion operations a second during continuous operation.

Put another way, a Blue Gene/P operating at a petaflop is performing more operations than a 1.5-mile-high (2.4km) stack of laptops.

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Very cool. Quite an accomplishment.