Just to put things into perspective for people, here are a few of these absolutely amazing specifications for the Cray XT..
Type: The Cray XT computer is a distributed-memory massively parallel MIMD supercomputer.
What Is It: A petaflop computer can process one quadrillion floating-point calculations per second. That's 1,000,000,000,000,000 calculations every
second.
Processors: 182,000 AMD quad-core Opterons, running at 2.3 gigahertz.
Memory Capacity: 362 terabytes of memory (with 578 terabytes per second of memory bandwidth).
OS: Cray XTs run UNICOS/lc, a flavor of Unix with networking and file-system enhancements from BSD.
They even said it is phenomenal for gaming! (lol, sarcasm, but this computer obviously is quite the rig.)
In reality, the projects this beast will be working on include, from the NCSS website..
Library of Flames Illuminates Design of Advanced Combustion Devices
Insight into how flames stabilize, extinguish, and reignite may spawn new predictive models that guide the design of engines that burn less fuel and
generate fewer pollutants and greenhouse gases.
Invisible Means of Support
A team led by astrophysicist Piero Madau of the University of California-Santa Cruz (UCSC) has given us a glimpse into the invisible world of dark
matter, performing the largest computer simulation ever of dark matter evolving in a galaxy such as the Milky Way. The results of their findings
appear in the August 7 issue of the journal Nature.
And a plethora of other projects that will invariably lead to huge scientific advancements.
I can only imagine what things will be like ten years from now, where petaflop computing will be accessible to larger markets able to perform their
own research.
