Lowell Deeds

“Look up in the sky… it’s a bird, no it’s a plane, no… it’s Supercomputer. Stronger than a popup blocker…faster than a WiFi connection…able to compute large figures with a single click…It’s Supercomputer… Yes, IBM’s Blue Grene/L supercomputer can do 280.6 trillion calculations a second (I wouldn’t want to play Trivial pursuit against this thing). Last June Blue Gene/L was ranked the fastest computer on earth. Every six months super computers are ranked by experts ( I can hear it now…“on your mark… get set… BOOT?) Just how fast is 280.6 trillion calculations a second? Well, think of it this way… if you gave every person in the world a handheld calculator it would take them more that a decade to do 280.6 trillion calculations…now that’s wicked fast. Of course, you don’t use this thing to play Sims or other computer games. No… the National Nuclear Security Administration is using this powerhouse to help ensure that the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile remains safe and reliable…And…Blue Gene/L doesn’t work alone. It has a partner called “Purple”. Together they can compute half of a quadrillion operations per second…a quadrillion? yes…want to see a quadrillion?… 1,000,000,000,000,000. When Blue Gene/L is not working on the U.S. nuclear arsenal it’s doing work on modeling the human brain. Technology has come so far …I wonder what’s next…maybe a can opener that doesn’t slip off the lid?… Nah.