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Say ta-ta to teraflops

Bangalore: Say ta-ta to teraflops; petaflops are here. A hitherto unbreachable boundary was crossed last week, when the biannual ‘Top 500’ rating of the world’s most powerful computing systems ratified the performance of the “Roadrunner,” an IBM supercomputer housed in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory. It achieved a sustained speed of 1.105 petaflops or 1105 teraflops. A petaflop stands for one quadrillion (a million billion) ‘floating point’ computer operations per second. It is the world’s fastest computer today.

Coming close on its heels was another machine, also operated by the Department of Energy: The Jaguar, a Cray computer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory also broke the petaflop barrier with a performance of 1.059 petaflops or 1059 teraflops. Analysts say this landmark has been achieved at least a year earlier than expected — and as more machines become ‘peta’fied, the scientific community will have an unprecedented number crunching tools to address major challenges like climate modelling or drug discovery.

Futurologist Raymond Kurzweil rates the human brain as equal to a 10-petaflop machine, and suggests that machines might match human calculating power in about seven years.

The Top 500 list ( www.top500.org) includes eight India-based computers. Two of them are indigenously designed and assembled ‘clusters’ — large numbers of standard computers strung together. The fastest Indian machine is the Eka, a 132.8 teraflop cluster at the Tata-funded Central Research Laboratory in Pune, which ranks 13.

Last year it was no. 4.The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC), also headquartered in Pune, returns to the Top 500 list after a few years, on the strength of its beefed-up Param cluster, which is rated at a sustained 37.8 teraflops and listed at no. 69.

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