If you need to model things like the worlds weather, nuclear reactions, molecular dynamics or simulate the first few seconds after the big bang, you’re going to need some pretty serious computing power but just how much more powerful are the top 10 supercomputers compared to the PC on your desktop or the latest iPad Pro for example.
A FLOP is a calculation that would be either adding, subtracting, multiplying or dividing 2 numbers with decimal points in them.
For example, 10.545 multiplied by 6.387 would be a single FLOP. Modern computers can do this billions of times per second.
At the time of making this video Feb 2016 the latest iPad Pro with the A9x dual core cpu is capable of about 1.5 gigaflops, that’s 1.5 thousand million FLOPS per second
Typical $1000 pc with a single Intel 5820 6 core CPU is capable of around 100 GigaFLOPS that’s 66 times more that the iPad pro
Because supercomputers are so much powerful they are measured in PetaFLOPS. 1 PetaFLOP is equal to 1000 TeraFLOPs and 1 TeraFLOP is = 1000 GigaFLOPS and remember our PC was 100 GigaFLOPS and the Ipad Pro 1.5 GigaFLOPS
A petaflop is equal to about one million billion calculations per second.
10 Stampede super computer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, United States
it has a maximum Linpack performance of 5.1 PFLOPS, that’s
That’s equivalent to 51,000 of our PC’s or 3.4M iPad pro’s. It has 462,462 processing cores, 192 Terabytes of RAM and consumes a maximum of 4.5 Mw of power