Science in Seconds - Supercomputers

Science in Seconds Know Everything RAVES - Supercomputers Torah Kachur: Petaflop. Our computers are getting so powerful that we have to make up ridiculous words to describe just how powerful they really are. A petaflop means that a computer can perform a quadrillion, or a million billion mathematical operations every second. The Cray XT5 supercomputer, nicknamed Jaguar, is housed at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility and is the most powerful computer in the world. Its massive 1.75 petaflop capacity was designed to compensate for the computer scientists' lack of social skills, and to tackle some of the most fundamental and complicated questions in science today. Climate change, super novas, and the behavior of quarks is all being super-computed as we speak. The dawn of public access super-computing is here. A petaflop sounds big, or just plain dumb, depending on your perspective, but how big is 1.75 petaflops? The human brain, the most complex computing system on Earth, is estimated to operate at 1,000 petaflops. I'm going to call that a twofer-gigaboob. We are no where close to constructing a machine as powerful as our own cranium, but one of these days we will, and then what? Can we ever mimic the human brain in a machine? Can a machine process memories, learn, and develop morality? When we improve our computing power, we may have to apply sentience to a mass of wires. We may be 1,000 fold more powerful than the Jaguar, but maybe one day our brains will be able to manufacture something as intelligent as ourselves. Courtesy of Science in Seconds – All rights reserved Only for educational/non-profit purposes. (Translators are invited to put their name here)