In this age is super computers we are seeing lots of new inventions and speed of computers have gone from fast to lightening. We can see new supercomputers being developed every now and then. So which is the fastest super computer as of today and how fast is it? According to Top500 list for November, K computer made by Fujitsu is the fastest supercomputer which has the performance of 10.51 petaflops which is equivalent to 10.51 quadrillion floating point operations per second.
How fast is 10.51 Petaflops?
Although some of us might understand floating point operations, we cannot actually visualize or understand how fast it is. So lets compare it to the most popular and fastest tablet around, the iPad. iPad has a powerful A5 processor which is dual-core and runs at 1GHz clock speed. The A5 processor reaches 170.9 megaflops as per the stats. The currently available Intel Core i7 980 XE, is capable of 109 gigaflops, so lets put together all these data.
- A5 processor in iPad 2- 171 megaflops
- Intel Core i7 980 EX- 109,000 megaflops
- K Computer (fastest supercomputer)- 10,510,000,000 megaflops
This means, the fastest supercomputer is equivalent to a whopping 61 million iPads! If you pile up these iPad 2 units, then it reaches about 540 km high!
So now you can visualize how fast is the world’s fastest supercomputer.
Thanks to Pingdom for this data.
