back to article UK's supercomputers rev up to hit 800 teraflops

The UK's supercomputing programme in Edinburgh enters its third stage this week, ramping up its capability to 800 trillion floating point operations per second. Four years after their installation at Edinburgh Uni's Advanced Computing Facility in 2008, the two supercomputers – HECToR and BlueGene/Q – will achieve a combined …

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  1. Tom Womack
    Facepalm

    Two too many millions in the first sentence!

  2. nvo
    Stop

    yottaflops

    umm... I think the words you were looking for are "thousand thousand thousand thousand" or "million million". Unless the UK is hiding 800 yottaflops of computing power somewhere...

  3. Tom Womack
    Boffin

    Last para is rather unclear.

    Blue Gene/Q is the energy-efficient one, Hector is the XE6 (enormous pile of Bulldozers).

    Blue Gene/Q is in no sense a distributed computing project; it's a collection of cabinets (probably four cabinets) each containing an enormous pile of custom IBM chips each containing 16 PowerPC cores.

  4. Arnold Lieberman
    Headmaster

    Haven't heard of those SI units...

    "Using the energy equivalent to that consumed by just one lightbulb to perform the calculations of 100 laptops."

    Is that a 3w CCFL or a 500w floodlight? V-Tech "my first laptop" or Alienware gaming rig?

    1. Tom Womack
      Boffin

      Re: Haven't heard of those SI units...

      Blue Gene Q is a 2GFlop/watt configuration; so a 100W lightbulb and a hundred Atom laptops.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Uni computer?

    "...HECToR's data-digesting power has been used by scientists across the UK to crunch through projects as diverse as modelling dinosaur walks, predicting climate change and understanding air turbulence..."

    Used for pissing about on FacePuke, or watching shite on YouTube more like. That's what every other computer in every other university spends most of its time doing.

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