Reed's Ruminations: The Past, Present, and Future

Reflections on science, technology, and computing — leavened by personal experience

Tag: supercomputer

  • The Zeros Matter: Bigger Is Different
    The Zeros Matter: Bigger Is Different

    Not that long ago, a megabyte was a lot of storage, whether primary or secondary. Not long ago supercomputers were defined by the number of megaflops they achieved. Times change. Bigger is not just bigger, bigger is different. Quantitative change begets qualitative change.

  • The Fallacy of Rankings
    The Fallacy of Rankings

    The latest, semi-annual Top 500 ranking of the world’s fastest supercomputers will be revealed at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) in June. Last year, two systems broke the petascale barrier using a GPU/game accelerator processor cluster (LANL’s Roadrunner) and a cluster of commodity microprocessors (ORNL’s Jaguar). As always, we can expect the latest announcement to…