Petaflop, what does it mean to you? Yes, it does sound a lot as it’s the next step after teraflop. Does 10 petaflops sounds a lot to you? Because Fujitsu has done it with the upcoming “K” supercomputer. It’s able to crunch through 10 quadrillion operations every time you blink your eye. Now, compare that to the current champ of processing farms, Cray’s Jaguar, which can handle only (only!) 1.75 petaflops of workload and you’ll know that we’re talking about a seminal leap in performance. Japan’s Riken Research Institute is the fortunate addressee on the crates of ultrafast SPARC64 VIIIfx processors that Fujitsu is now shipping out and the current plan is to have everything up and running by 2012. In total, there’ll be 80,000 CPUs, each possessing 8 cores running at 2.2GHz, which will be housed within 800 racks. So yes, there’ll be a machine somewhere on the Japanese isle with 640,000 processing cores at its disposal. Sadly you’ll never have the chance to play Crysis with this.

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SOURCE via CNET