[Buckaroo]

I wonder when the Mac will reach a pedaflop.

[Nebagakid]

that sounds like the dirtiest thing ever.

"Hey kid, wanna see my pedaflop?" "Mr. Wilson across the street is such a pedaflop." "it was then, in a pedaflopic manner, he declared he was a crazed man."

[rickey939]

Pedaflop = Michael Jackson?

[Brien]

Isn't it 'petaflop'?

[MindFad]

Hahahahahahahahahahaaha.

[JoshuaZ]

Is that really something we can justify?

[The Godfather]

pedo = fart in Spanish

[seanc]

Originally Posted by Google

Definitions of petaflop on the Web:

* A theoretical measure of computer speed that corresponds to a thousand trillion (1015) floating point operations per second.
Genomics and Proteomics - Glossary

* In computing, FLOPS is an abbreviation of floating point operations per second. This is used as a measure of a computer's performance, especially in fields of scientific calculations that make heavy use of floating point calculations.(Note: a hertz is a cycle (or operation) per second. Compare to MIPS -- million instructions per second.)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petaflop

I think he means the above ^^^^

[voodoo]

Originally Posted by rickey939

Pedaflop = Michael Jackson?

Ahaha

that was funny!

V

[voodoo]

Originally Posted by The Godfather

pedo = fart in Spanish

¿Tira un pedoflop?

V

[Buckaroo]

Hmmm, maybe Google decided to change the spelling.

Seymour Cray, Supercomputer Architect

Pedaflop Computing

Not long ago I attended a workshop, and it was called enabling technologies for pedaflop computing. Now, some of you may not know what a pedaflop is, so let me explain that, assuming that some of you don't. Along about 1960, I remember, because I was involved, we invented the player piano sequence and made the floating point in our computer, versus bringing a subroutine to do it. And from that time on we could say how many flops does your machine do, Floating Point Operations, flops? How many flops does your computer do? And so today when we look at personal computers we say how many megaflops do they do? How many million floating point operations per second?

People that can afford big workstations can say how many gigaflops does your computer do? That's 1000 megaflops. Well, that's enough for most people. But, you know, there's always a government laboratory that wants something bigger. And so we have one today. It's the Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, and they wanted a teraflop machine. And so they ordered one from Intel, and it's being delivered sort of piecemeal now, and by the middle of next year it's supposed to be all done, and it's supposed to run at a teraflop. And it has 9900 processors. It is a real monster. And, of course, all the other national laboratories are very jealous and they say, well, it costs too much, $40-some million, it won't work anyway, who needs one? But I think it's kind of nice that we have a teraflop machine because I guess we needed one. I'm not quite sure. Anyway, that's a teraflop.

Now, I think you know what a pedaflop is. A pedaflop is 1000 teraflops, and we're nowhere near to getting a pedaflop machine. But agencies like to talk about it. So they were the sponsors of this workshop.

I was the keynote speaker at this first pedaflop conference. Now, they are annual. You know, once you get started you can do it every year. And so I talked about revolution. I talked about where we might go in the future to build a pedaflop machine. And I talked about things like can't we use biology? And everyone smiled and said nice things, but as I listened to the other talks, everyone talked evolution. And what the group thought, and this is a group of probably 30 technical people. They were all supposed to be top-notch in their various areas, they said if we just keep doing what we're doing, in 20 years we'll have pedaflop. And they had a documentation to prove it. They had a straight line on semilog paper.

Now, you know how that works. I mean, anything is a straight line on semilog paper. And so what they'd done is they put two points on the chart for the last 10 years of progress in computers, and they just extended it for 24 years, and sure enough it came to a pedaflop.

[Buckaroo]

I notice that Wikipedia decided to change the spelling too. From what I can find, most articles from old timers spelled it Peda, vs. the new spelling Peta. I don't know, maybe something PC happened.

[ghporter]

The formal SI prefix for 10^15 is "peTa." Wiki needs more reviewers and fewer posters.

[The Godfather]

This is the first time I hear "Peda" as the metric prefix that is 1000 times a Tera (or 1 million Gigas, or 10^15). It has always been spelled "Peta" for me in the two languages I am fluent in: Spanish and English.

On the other hand, this may help English speakers pronounce "Peta" as 'pA-tä. It's always problematic to me that the sounds of 't' and 'd' are often swapped in English, unlike in Spanish, where their sounds are constant.

[Chuckit]

The sounds of T and D aren't usually swapped, per se; they're just both reduced to an alveolar flap. Not that most English speakers know what an alveolar flap is, but that's linguistically what's going on.

[Buckaroo]

Anyhow, what fraction of a PeTaflop is the latest Mac?

[Chuckit]

Originally Posted by Buckaroo

Anyhow, what fraction of a PeTaflop is the latest Mac?

A really, really small one. The Mac Pro doesn't even approach 1 teraflop, which is 0.1% of a petaflop.

[Buckaroo]

Wasn't a Teraflop the measure for a Supercomputer? I thought Mac passed that years ago.

[Chuckit]

You're thinking of a gigaflop. Supercomputers used to be measured by gigaflops back in the '90s, but nowadays any old Joe with a modern Dell can outdo them.

[KeriVit]

no
no

[Buckaroo]

ok, so are we at a Teraflop yet?

[The Godfather]

With Quartz Composer, you can make compositions that effectively utilize 60x640x480xN flops = 18.4 x N MFlops, where N is the number of operations per pixel.

Of course, you are using the processor inside your graphics card, but it still counts

[Buckaroo]

Oh well, atleast we are in the Gigaflop range.