CNET Top 5: Most powerful computers Video

CNET Top 5: Most powerful computers Video Transcript

Welcome to CNET Top 5, where each time we meet we count down another hot CNET list. I'm Tom Merritt. People have been fantasizing about megapowerful computers for years: witness our recent Top 5 computers from the movies. But how powerful are real supercomputers? How close is reality to fantasy? Thanks to top500.org we can find out. Let's count down the world's most powerful supercomputers. At No. 5, A Cray! The Cray XT4 Jaguar to be exact. Yes, the distant cousin of that Cray. It's a country computer from Oak Ridge, Tennessee. But this is an Oak Ridge Boy with some muscle, crunching 205 teraflops per second. Coming in at No. 4, Ranger. Or Ranger Sunblade x6420 if you're bein' formal. It comes from Austin, Texas. And yes, everything is bigger in Texas. It is the largest computing system in the world for open science research. And it runs on Linux, the CentOS distro. Up to No. 3, IBM's BlueGene/P Solution at the Argonne National Laboratory, outside the windy city of Chicago. Want to keep up with the BlueGene/P? Just get every single person on Earth to do 70,000 additions or multiplications per second! Sliding in at No. 2, Another, bigger Blue Gene. The BlueGene/L at the Lawrence Livermore Labs in California. The former champion had held the top spot since 2004. Until now. Holy toroidal network, Batman! What could knock it off? Before we get to No. 1, let's take a look at the 5 below the 5 most powerful supercomputers. EKA's India's second supercomputer to make the top 10. All right. Let's get to our No. 1. A supercomputer so powerful it leaves the others in its dust. Get ready to be blown away at No. 1... The Roadrunner at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. $100 million, 6,000 square feet, 57 miles of fiber optics, weighing in at half-a-million pounds, it's twice as fast as the Blue Gene/L at one quadrillion floating point operations per second, or 1 petaflop/s. That's computing power equal to 100,000 of the fastest laptops. Well that's it for this edition of CNET's Top 5. To learn more about the world's fastest supercomputers be sure to visit the Top 500 Web site at top500.org. I'm Tom Merritt. See you next time.