Wednesday, November 16, 2016

That's fast

That's fast

Computers can work with very big numbers, and large computers (a.k.a. supercomputers) can do things the mind cannot comprehend.

I just took a look at the latest list of the world's fastest supercomputers.  The fastest is from China.  The second is also from China.  Third place goes to the United States.

What makes this list so fascinating is that the fastest is three times quicker than number two.  And number two is twice as fast as number three.  From that point, capabilities of individual computers relative to their nearest competitor is measured in a few percentage points.

So, just how fast is the fastest supercomputer?

Let's see if I can put it into perspective.  The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second!  There are 5,280 feet in a mile, so the speed of light is 982,080,000 feet per second.  Express that in inches, and the speed of light is 11,784,960,000 inches per second!  That's nearly 12 billion inches per second.

How fast is the fastest supercomputer?  Speeds of supercomputers are measured in the number of mathematical computations they can perform in a single second.

The fastest supercomputer is capable of performing  93,014,600,000,000,000 calculations per second.  I'm not sure how to pronounce that number, but it's over 93,000 trillion calculations per second.

That's fast.  Of course, there is no single computer that can run that fast.  Supercomputers are built by combining many individual computers into a cluster that shares computational duties among themselves.  The fastest supercomputer has a cluster of 10,649,600 individual computers working in unison.

Using computers of this speed, is it any wonder that some scientists believe computers can be programmed to mimic human behaviour, or break any password you might be able to come up with?

I wonder if any of the security analysts in the "western world" are concerned that China's fastest computer is six times faster than the "western world's" fastest computer?  Are you?