New BlueGene/L more powerful than all F@H systems.

[CougTek]

According to this news at Ars Technica, IBM's BlueGene/L is capable of achieving 280.6TFLOPS, while the entire F@H contributors can only reach 178TFLOPS.

The numbers of BlueGene/L are impressive. The supercomputer has 131072 processors. The whole F@H community has 186172 active CPUs. I'm sure that if all F@H systems were optimized, we would collectively smash IBM's new offspring though, but still. One computer beating...the world. It's insane.

I wouldn't want to pay the electricity bill to power it.

 

[P5-133XL]

When dealing with a new Super-Computer one has to take the flops numbers with a large grain of salt. The standard is to quote the theoretical maximum and rarely give useable numbers. Their point is marketing and to get to the top of the list and if they can streach the numbers, you can bet they will to sell a couple of extra machines.

 

[sechs]

Folks need to keep in mind that Bluegene is designed from the chip on up to do the same work that a large number of general purpose computers are doing individually over a widely dispersed network. Bluegene has efficiency and optimization advantages that Folding@home simply cannot meet.