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World’s fastest supercomputer

How many laptops does it take to match the computing power of the world’s fastest supercomputer?

Last year, engineers at Argonne National Laboratory, outside Chicago, installed the first pieces of a machine that will have more than triple the speed of the world’s fastest computer.

By this summer, it will be able to perform a(1,000,000,000,000,000) calculations per second. Its maker, IBM, says it would take a tower of laptop computers a mile and a half high to match its power.

This speed demon is called the Blue Gene/P. it’s the successor to IBM’S Blue Gene/L, the current world champion.

The latest machine is “another step on the never-ending journey to apply more computer power to the problems at hand,” said Dave Turek, IBM’s vice-president for supercomputing.

France and Japan are joining a race to achieve what computer scientists call “petaflop” performance. “Peta-“ is the scientific prefix for quadrillion, and “flop”-shorthand for “floating point operations”- is a standard of computer power.

As of now, the fastest supercomputers measure their speed in “teraflops,” meaning trillions of calculations.

The Blue Gene/P machine is supposed to reach one petaflop—1 quadrillion sustained operations per second—in the middle of this year.

Turek said IBM’s goal was 10 petaflops by 2011 and 20 petaflops by 2017.

“There is currently a race to the petaflop,” said Jack Dongarra at University of Tennessee’s Innovative Computing Laboratory. Dongarra is part of an international group that keeps track of the Top500, a list of the fastest supercomputers in the world.

“the 10 petaflop system will be like the Hubble Space Telescope,” Dongarra said. “In comparison, most of us use computers that are like binoculars.”

Over the horizon waits the next quantum leap in computing: “exaflop.” “Exa-“ stands for quintillion—1,000 times faster than a petaflop.

“We’re working on it already,” IBM’s Turek said.

Vocabulary Focus

Prefix(n)---  A group of letters added to the beginning of a word to change the meaning or make a new word.

Shorthand(n)---  Q quicker way of saying or writing something.

Hubble space telescope (n phr)---  A powerful telescope with a mirror diameter of 94.5 inches; it was named after American astronomer Edwin P, Hubble, launched on April 24, 1990, and now orbits the earth.

Quantum leap(n phr) ---  A great improvement or important advancement in something.

Specialized terms

Mecca (n)--- 吸引人潮的胜地 A place to which many people are attracted