The Blue Gene/P machine at Argonne is supposed to reach one petaflop — 1 quadrillion sustained operations per second — in 2008. It should have a peak speed of three petaflops by the end of 2008.

Turek said IBM’s goal was 10 petaflops by 2011 and 20 petaflops by 2017. The Japanese have announced their intent to reach 10 petaflops by 2012.

FURTHER READING
IBM and Google have dedicated a large cluster of several hundred computers (a combination of Google machines and IBM BladeCenter and System x servers) that is planned to grow to more than 1,600 processors.

Students will access the cluster via the Internet to test their parallel programming course projects. The servers will run open source software including the Linux operating system, XEN systems virtualization and Apache’s Hadoop project, an open source implementation of Google’s published computing infrastructure, specifically MapReduce and the Google File System (GFS).

Sony PS3’s have helped the Folding@Home project to pass a petaflop in processing power during Sept 2007

Brian Wang

Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.

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