Later today will see the release of a list detailing the 500 most powerful computers in the world. Boffins currently gathering at a meeting in Germany will decide which machine will fill the shoes of last year's number one – IBM's ASCI White, which managed to reach the incredible speed of 12.3 teraflops (or 12.3 trillion operations per second). This amount of power was compared to every person on earth pressing the 'Enter' key at the same time.
Last year was dominated by the incorrigible IBM who had a total of 200 entries in the top 500 and who have been working just as hard this year. The head of supercomputing for IBM in Europe has told silicon.com that the competition is "as tough as Formula One racing".
Supercomputers are used for many different things such as the speeding up of scientific experiments, car crash simulations, weather forecasting by the Met Office in the UK and for handling databases which reach mind-boggling sizes. The other major players include many UNIX vendors, Cray and the Linux inventor, Linus Torvalds, who was involved in the production of a supercomputer this year – which was particularly small in size – but how it stands against the established big boys of supercomputing shall be revealed later.
News source: Silicon.com
