[ExI] petaflop computers

[Spargemeister]

On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 8:53 AM, Stefano Vaj <stefano.vaj at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 2:12 PM, Spargemeister <sparge at gmail.com> wrote:
>> It's a milestone, not a barrier.
>
> Sure, but I am a little confused with regard to the journalistic hype
> that presents it as a kind of dramatic paradigm shift, without on the
> other hand ever precisely indicating what classes of problems exist
> that are radically intractable at a teraflops level but do not require
> in the least esaflops or ettaflops computers...

It's just a poorly-written article. Teraflops->petaflops isn't a
paradigm shift. It may make some computations practical that weren't
before, but, in general it just made existing codes run faster and
made more cycles available to more researchers.

-Dave