May 20, 2005

What Is a Supercomputer?

By VINCENT KIERNAN

Article: Budget Cuts at NSF May Signal a Crisis in Computing

By definition, a supercomputer is one of the fastest computers available at any given moment.

The reigning king of supercomputing is IBM's Blue Gene/L, under development in Rochester, Minn. It has been clocked at performing more than 135 trillion computations in a single second, more than 100,000 times what a desktop computer can handle. Blue Gene/L, which

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