[dba-Tech] What exactly is a petaflop?

[Jim Lawrence]

Here is a link the big systems in the world. Attached is the list of the top 500:

https://www.top500.org/statistics/sublist/

All these super computers, except two, are Linux. Comparing Linux and Windows boxes is not really a fair comparison. The Windows OS is built for singular stand-alone box. The Linux OS is build like lego blocks, just supply the hardware and everything just snaps together...on and on and on...

http://www.wikihow.com/Build-a-Supercomputer

For the price of $40K you to can have a supercomputer in your basement. Mind you, the electric bill would stagger and that is after the hardware costs. The fastest computer in the world is just using a slightly tricked up version of Ubuntu 14.04 (Kylin) and reaches speeds of 125,435 Teraflops but that should be expected with 10,649,600 Cores. 

Jim

----- Original Message -----
From: "stuart" <stuart at lexacorp.com.pg>
To: "Discussion of Hardware and Software issues" databaseadvisors.com>
Sent: Monday, November 28, 2016 3:03:53 PM
Subject: Re: [dba-Tech] What exactly is a petaflop?

Flops (floating point instructions per second) are used as a general indicator of a CPUs 
performance since much computing involves manipulation of floating point numbers.

A gigaflop is 10^9 flops    or 1,000,000,000
A petaflop is 10^15 flops  or 1,000,000,000,000,000

A modern  Intel i7 CPU found in today's  top end PCs and laptops will probably come in at 
somewhere around 100 gigaflops. (10^11 flops)

So a 1 petaflop computer would have approximetly the power of 10^4 or 10,000 PCs.

The current record for a super computer is chinese and  has been measured at 93 petaflops, 
so that one is roughly euqivalent to  to 930,000 PCs  (call it a million in round figures)


(I hope I 've got the exponent math correct, if not - someone will correct me)



On 28 Nov 2016 at 13:48, Arthur Fuller wrote:

> I've looked it up and arrived at a general definition, but I have no
> idea what that definition means in practical hardware, nor what it
> might be useful for. Apparently it means 1,000 trillion instructions
> per second (a quadrillion, if memory serves), but what sort of
> hardware is capable of that? Certainly nothing I could afford! Is this
> the sort of thing Deep Blue was made of? What about these machines and
> software such as VaultDB which claim to claim numerous server-CPUs as
> a single workspace and thus enable 100 GB of RAM to be one single DB
> workspace?
> 
> I'm afraid that I don't understand any of this any more.
> 
> -- 
> Arthur
> _______________________________________________
> dba-Tech mailing list
> dba-Tech at databaseadvisors.com
> http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/dba-tech
> Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com
> 


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