[ExI] petaflop computers

[spike]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org 
> [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of 
> Stefano Vaj
> Sent: Thursday, November 20, 2008 5:54 AM
> To: ExI chat list
> Subject: Re: [ExI] petaflop computers
> 
> 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...
> 
> Stefano Vaj


Yes, and they need to go into a bit more detail about the specific class of
problems that can be solved with massively parallel computing.  Some
problems require linear calculations, most problems actually, so I am
interested in the fastest single processors.  Of course we can always make a
jillion of these and set them to work in parallel to play chess or searching
for record primes and such, but that is a limited class of calculations.

What is the state of the art in linear processing?  How many flops are we
getting out of the latest 2000 dollar consumer level machine?

spike