Supercomputer race: Tricky to boost system speed
Every June and November, with fanfare lacking only in actual drum rolls and trumpet blasts, a new list of the world's fastest supercomputers is revealed. Vendors brag, and the media reach for analogies such as "It would take a patient person with a handheld calculator x number of years (think millennia) to do what this hunk of hardware can spit out in one second."
The latest Top500 list, released in June, was seen as especially noteworthy because it marked the scaling of computing's then-current Mount Everest -- the petaflops barrier. Dubbed "Roadrunner" by its users, a computer built by IBM for Los Alamos National Laboratory topped the list of the 500 fastest computers, burning up the bytes at 1.026 petaflops, or more than 1,000 trillion arithmetic operations per second.
