tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11279175.post-56195821838283315312007-12-08T10:17:00.000-08:002007-12-08T10:19:00.116-08:00I thought this was kinda fun: You can now buy a 1 teraflop super computer from HP that you can plug into a normal wall socket and doesn't need a data center. It costs about $50K. (That's about 50x faster than a pretty high end desktop).<br />For comparison, in 1998, the fastest civilian super computer in the world was the IBM Blue Gene with 9000+ Pentiums running at 1.3 teraflops and costing over $5MM. They've become dramatically cheaper in the last couple years w. all the multi-core chips.<br />A $100K computer in 2006 costs about $20K today (same performance).<br />Estimates are that all of the top 500 super computers in the world will run over 1 Petaflop by 2015.<br />Asimov's "positronic brains" always ran at 1 petaflop, so, not only are we going to run out of energy, have half the coastlines in the world under water and enormous droughts, but there will be a robot rebellion too. Watch your Roomba for odd behavior.portlandianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00327741092886325896noreply@blogger.com