A look at computing performance and usage

 3.6GHz Pentium 4: 1 GFLOPS  1.8GHz Opteron: 3 GFLOPS (2003)  3.2GHz Xeon X5460, quad-core: 82 GFLOPS  IBM Roadrunner: 1.1 PFLOPS

 1,105 TFLOPS  120,000 cores  AMD Opteron (1.8 GHz)  PowerXCell 8i (3.2 Ghz)  Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico  $133M  Manages US nuclear weapons

 1,059 TFLOPS  150,000 cores: Opteron (2.3 GHz)  Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee  Usage awarded by the INCITE program  “Computational Protein Structure Prediction and Protein Design”  “Interaction of Turbulence and Chemistry in Lean Premixed Laboratory Flames”  Climate research, combustion, nuclear physics, fusion energy, space physics, and fluid turbulence

 487 TFLOPS  51,000 cores: Xeon (3.0 GHz)  NASA Ames Research Center, California

 478 TFLOPS  213,000 cores: PowerPC (700 MHz)  Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California  Made in 2007, when it was the world’s fastest  Manages the US stockpile of nuclear weapons (as the Roadrunner also does)

 450 TFLOPS  164,000 cores: PowerPC (850 MHz)  Argonne National Laboratory, Illinois  Uses an architecture newer than Blue Gene/L; can be expanded to 3 PFLOPS  Usage granted by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment program  Physics of star explosions

 #6: Sun Ranger, nano-scale technology, Opteron  #7: Cray Franklin XT4, simulation and modeling  #8: Cray Jaguar XT4, Department of Energy projects  #9: Cray Red Storm XT3, nuclear stockpile testing  #10: Dawning 5000A, Opteron, China’s fastest  weather forecasting  oil exploration  genetic research  aviation and aeronautics

 top500.org, networkworld.com top500.orgnetworkworld.com  nytimes.com nytimes.com  cpu-world.com, intel.com, amd.com cpu-world.comintel.comamd.com src=hm_list