Petaflop barrier broken.

[AriusEso]

Didn't know where else to put this.

1943: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer
2008: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7443557.stm

[newborn]

The IBM machine, codenamed Roadrunner, has been shown to run at "petaflop speeds", the equivalent of one thousand trillion calculations per second.

[...]

It will also be used for research into astronomy, genomics and climate change.

My guess is that they will still be unable to predict if it is going to rain tomorrow or not. so many CPU cycles wasted...

[CSharpDavid]

and why is the US war head monitoring so difficult ? 200 in Iowa , 15000 in Texas , .....

[Waterman]

How disappointing to see that these technological innovations are mainly used to manage the US nuclear weapon arsenal.

Not much more to say ...

[Raine]

My guess is that they don't know how else to put these super imba computers to use.

I'd start an AI project or a real-life like renderer... man that would be just great.

[petroz]

Worlds most powerful computer, World most powerful weapons arsenal.. Is it codenamed skynet?

[Waterman]

Worlds most powerful computer, World most powerful weapons arsenal.. Is it codenamed skynet?

Ca 5500 USD / household went to military expenses in the US last year. That's 10 % of the  income per household. 600 billion dollars. 5 times more per capita than in Europe. About.

How about codenaming it "Failure"? In fact, the supercomputers could well take over this planet. Mankind aint behaving well.

[serial]

This is all speculation.  But I'd assume the computer does more than run a spread sheet that keeps track of the nukes.  It probably runs the simulations as well.  As nukes age thier abilities change.  It may have to take in to account altitude and terrain.

[Lenn]

It's unrealistic that they use it all for "monitoring nuclear arsenal". I read some time ago that this always was and always will be the cover for using computers in counterintelligence and decryption. The army isn't obliged to tell you what they're really doing. Decryption takes by far the most processing power and in theory, with enough CPU power anything in the world can be decrypted. That's what they're doing.

As far as THIS article goes, if you read more carefully, you would see that it's just a number that is but one of the characteristics of CPU power. To me, honestly, this article just looks like nothing more but a PR stunt by Sony in the name of PS3.