The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) announced the second most capable Ultrafast system in today’s world, the ‘Ranger’ supercomputer which can handle 504 teraflops. It however does not match up to the record held by IBM’s BlueGene/L which performs at 596 teraflops and is the fastest supercomputer today. U.S. Government owned Sandia and Oak Ridge national laboratories said that they have begun developing a concept for the next generation of supercomputers - ones which will have the capacity to take up enormous real time processing tasks. Preparing groundwork for an exascale computer is the mission of these Institutions. An exaflop is a thousand times more faster than a petaflop, which itself is a thousand times faster than a teraflop. Teraflop computers were originally developed by Sandia 10 years ago. They are currently the world’s fastest, however exaflop computers look to replace these by exceeding their capacity to perform a million trillion calculations per second.
Now it seems quite odd that scientists are already rushing in on the idea of such a supercomputer which would prove to be a successor for the brand of supercomputers which have not even been introduced to the world today. The petascale computers with a capacity of only 1 PFlops are expected to come into reality in maybe the next one or two years, these are supposed to be a thousand times faster than a 1 TFlops system and already scientists are starting research for developing an exascale system, which would obviously be way more faster than these computers ever will be. This goes to show that just how fast technology is developing.
Image: Sun HPC
Source: TG Daily
