A 20 petaFLOPS per second PC.

[UID=0]

I thought about posting this in the hardware section, but seeing as these
are just theoretical at the present moment, I thought that I had better place this here.

Apologies if it's not in the correct place though.

20 petaFLOPS per second, which is just a phenomenally large number.

Although it supposedly won't be completed until 2012 though.

# Sequoia, a proposed super computer built by IBM for the National Nuclear Security Administration will be completed, reaching a peak performance of 20 Petaflops.
# Pleiades, a proposed super computer built by Intel and SGI for NASA's Ames Research Center, will be completed, reaching a peak performance of 10 Petaflops (10 quadrillion floating point operations per second).

It seems that some fairly recent PC processors (2008) are capable of reaching from 70 GFLOPs upwards, although GPU's can reach 1000 and above.

I'm trying to imagine how powerful 20 quadrillion floating point operations per second would be
in terms of rendering a video file or 3D graphics still, that may take around 2-4 minutes on an average PC?

A few seconds maybe? I wonder if anybody knows what could be done with 20 PetaFLOPS on an average home PC? Maybe the PC would boot up in a few seconds or something?

According to WiKi, the 4 petaFLOPS barrier has been crossed by primarily enabling the cumulative effort of a vast array of PlayStation 3, CPU, and powerful GPU units,
so I suppose that one PC with that degree of processing power would be totally awesome and 20, well it speaks for itself
but I somehow doubt that home users will be allowed that degree of processing power for quite some time if at all, in 5-10 years maybe, but that's just a guess.

Some further info:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS

[Grizzly]

Yeah, probably Hardware over Site New and Feedback as this isn't site related.

Although, I agree, 20petaFLOPS is just....astronomical in terms of raw processing power. Crysis would be easy to play then lol.

[UID=0]

Yeah, probably Hardware over Site New and Feedback as this isn't site related.

Although, I agree, 20petaFLOPS is just....astronomical in terms of raw processing power. Crysis would be easy to play then lol.

Ahh, I thought that this was more news related though, seeing as it's in the development stage,
but maybe somebody can move this thread to wherever it would be most suitable for, (apologies in that case).

It's quite a hard number to get your head around really and I guess that it will probably be limited to the military/government type of agencies to begin with,
but that was the same with computer graphics in the early days as well. so maybe it may eventually filter down to the rest of us in time.

Crysis, I'm wondering if that is maybe related to CryTek at all, which I have a demo of?

[Gaijin]

Isn't CryTek the Engine that Crysis use, or something!

On Topic........... (8min later)

I still don't know what to say, You can download the internet...

[IllusionSlayer]

Playing Crysis and downloading the internet would not necessarily be possible with that much power. Playing crysis requires a graphics card which these machines do not have. Downloading the internet can technically be done on any machine with a large enough hard drive . These machines do have large hard drive capacity for storing all the data they process but not nearly enough to hold the internet.

This much power on a home computer? Wait a hundred years or so buddy. As for the operating system starting in a few seconds we have home pc's that can do that now so i wouldn't be too impressed.

In a home computer this would mean rendering insanely large images very quickly or encoding a very high quality feature length movie in seconds. Or you could run folding@home and instantly be number one on the folding list...

Those are all assuming that programs are made to actually use all that power. Something with that much power would likely have 1000's of cores...today's best program can handle 4 (theoretically 8 with hyper threading.)

[UID=0]

I had to look up folding@home to find out what it is about and it
is related to a complex scientific set of processes it seems, that are lost on me.

Comparitively though, I was reading recently that the latest movie Avatar, from James Cameron,
used, if I recall correctly, up to 10,000 quad core computers, that's 40,000 processors,
networked together as a render farm on this project, which has taken around 10 years to complete in total.

In terms of rendering, as an example, it said that it took 2,400 quad based computer hours,
to render 1 second's worth of movie footage with some of the frames.
So I don't know if that means that 2,400 computers networked together, took 1 hour to render 1 second's worth of footage, but it seems feasible.

So, I'm not exactly sure how 40,000 quad processors balances out against
20 petaFLOPS per second but maybe it could be in the region of
70 GFLOPS (or maybe more) x 40,000, assuming that the computers are working within the GFLOP range.

If 70 x 40,000 = 2,800,000 then that could still be trillions of miles away from 20 PFLOPS per second it seems, if that is how it works, I'm not sure as I'm not so good with mathematics.

10 to the power of 9 - gigaFLOPS
1 GFLOP = 1,000,000,000 - [1 billion]

10 to the power of 15 - petaFLOPS
1 PFLOP = 1,000,000,000,000,000 - [1 quadrillion or 1000 Trillion]

That is just 1 PFLOP, so 20 of them would be almost beyond comprehension and that type of processing power
would be absolutely awesome for graphics though, which does demand a lot of resources nowadays with the latest games and also rendering 3D movies.

I just hope that before too long and well within our lifetimes, that PC's
maybe not in the 20 PFLOP range, but with reasonably fantastically high processing capabilities will be available to us all.

[ktmrider530]

What's a petaFLOP?
sorry about the question, but i am interested.

[UID=0]

What's a petaFLOP?
sorry about the question, but i am interested.

No problem, FLOPS is an acronym meaning FLoating point Operations Per Second,
so 1 petaFLOP would be 1 qaudrillion - (1,000 Trillion) FLoating point Operations Per Second if my mathematics is correct.

So as you can imagine, 20 petaFLOPS per second would be just a phenomenal
amount of processing power.

It is explained much better here though:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS

I'm just trying to imagine what PC's with the processing power into exaFLOPS, zettaFLOPs and yottaFLOPs would be like?
But that would probably be realized within 30-70 years maybe.