uter ever to the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. The machine is really 512 computers and 8,192 microprocessors linked together. It’s designed to precisely simulate the explosion of nuclear weapons, so the US won’t have to perform nuclear testing. “ASCI White”, as the new computer is called, can perform 12 trillion calculations per second. ASCI stands for Advanced Strategic Computing Initiative. The computer’s fast calculation capability is equivalent of every man, woman and child on Earth adding 2,000 numbers per second. That’s about four times faster than the previous record holder, another IBM creation that performed 3 trillion calculations per second or 3 teraflops. The average home PC can perform a maximum of about 400 million calculations per second, about 30,000 times slower than IBM’s new creation. Other facts about the ASCI White according to IBM:-It covers 9,920 square feet of floor space, equivalent to the size of two basketball courts.-It weighs 212,600 pounds or 106 tons- the equivalent of 17 full-size Indian elephants-It requires 1.2 megawatts of power enough to power 1,000 typical homes.-The microprocessors inside contain 2,000 miles of copper wiring, enough to stretch from Washington, D.C. to Phoenix, Arizona.-It has 6.2 terabytes of memory, 97,000 times more than the average desktop PC with 64 MB of memory.-It would take one person with a calculator 10 million years to tabulate the number of calculations that ASCI White can handle in a single second.-If deployed as a web server, ASCI white could process an online transaction from every man, woman and child on the planet in one minute. With ongoing Research and Development projects like that of IBM’s , manufacturers are now channeling their resources to every inch of technological innovation to keep up with the advent of computer applications and breakthroughs. There are countless other innovati...
