Wednesday, November 13, 2013

Living in the future is more interesting than I'd thought

This really isn't all that surprising, when you think about it.  Supercomputers in the cloud:
What runs faster than the majority of the world's supercomputers, costs less, and was used to research organic solar-power cells? The answer is Megarun, a 1.21-petaflop super that was spun up by Cycle Computing in the AMAZON CLOUD.

...

The system's peak performance of 1.21 petaflops would rank it as the planet's 29th most powerful computer in the top 500 supers of the world as of June 2013, Cycle Computing said.

The majority of the system ran on Amazon's CC2 instances due to the performance of Intel's Sandy Bridge processors, Cycle told El Reg, though it did also use second-generation M3 processors, and the graphical-heavy C1 systems as well. Megarun's compute resources cost $33,000 through the use of Amazon's low-cost spot instances, we're told, compared with the millions and millions of dollars you'd have to spend to buy an on-premises rig.
$33,000 for the 29th fastest supercomputer in the world.  Wow.

So if we're living in the future, where's my flying car?

6 comments:

  1. Your car is stuck in a do loop on the 137th processor... :-)

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  2. A computer like that can execute an infinite loop in less than 30 milliseconds.

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  3. That computer is so fast that it gives you the answer before you ask the question ...

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  4. As a salesman, I do a LOT of driving. I do NOT want most people to have flying cars!

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  5. Oh, don't worry. That Moller guy will have one for you.

    Any day now.

    Real soon!

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  6. Is that similar to what SETI at home is doing?

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