The Sequoia uses 1.5 million processors to establish a benchmark speed of 16.32 petaflop/s which bested K Computer's 10.51 petaflop/s.
For those of you that would like to know what a mind blowing speed 16+ petaflops a second is - a petaflop is a quadrillion floating-point operations per second, or, to over simplify it a bit a quadrillion is 10 with 15 zeros after it or 10 million billion and Sequoia is doing 16+ basic mathematical operations of these. Can't hardly say the number let alone comprehend it.
In the BBC New article, IBM said that to put a bit more understanding to the number:
- Sequoia was capable of calculating in one hour what otherwise would have taken 6.7 billion people using hand calculators 320 years to complete if they had worked non-stop.
Also according to the article:
- Sequoia will be used to carry out simulations to help extend the life of aging nuclear weapons, avoiding the need for real-world underground tests.
Also not only is Sequoia faster than K but is also 150% more energy efficient using 7.9 megawatts to K's 12.6.
WIKI article here
3 comments:
Is it wrong that I looked at that speed, and the first thought about was what a great Gaming system that speed would make. My second thoughts went to AI and getting closer maybe to a conscious download of myself into something.
I'd even volunteer for a mechanical body, so long as a ship comes with it and I get to go exploring.
great mind Kall! I wondered in passing what that kind of power would be like to run a space flight sim on. Very Next Though was...wow, that is getting close enough for an AI to take up residence. hummm
what a wonderfully paranoid thought! Experimental platform my ass. Just look at the heat signature and you can see that there are massive structures right forward of amidship. Plus they are telling us there is no follow on craft tells me they really didn't have a need for this one or it was being used as a stop gap until the things we DON'T know about come online. I wonder how close it was to the Chinese lab.... I didn't follow its' flight path but I would be curious as to what it overflew. Being paranoid doesn't mean it isn't happening....
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