Cray's Jaguar now the fastest supercomputer on Earth

After five months, we have a new heir to the supercomputing throne. With 1.64 petaflops of peak processing power, Cray Inc.'s XT4 "Jaguar" supercomputer has surpassed IBM's "Roadrunner" to take the top spot.

So what does $100 million get you? According to Engadget, this beast-of-a-PC features 45,000 (yes, fourty five thousand) Quad-core Opteron processors (which makes up 180,000 processing cores, for anyone keeping score), 362 terabytes of memory, and 10 petabytes of storage in a hard-disk array.

This all probably sounds like jibber-jabber, so let me try to put this into perspective as best as I can. If you bought a PC in the past year, it probably either has 2 or 4 processing cores... not quite the same as 180,000. Your PC probably also has somewhere between 1 and 4 GB of memory, whereas the Jaguar hs 362,000 GB. And the hard drive space to download all of your movies? Your PC has anywhere between 60 to 500 GB of storage, whereas this supercomputer has 10,000,000 GB of space. This all ultimately adds up to be about 55,000 times faster than your typical PC, according to the AP.

Just something to think about the next time your PC is taking its sweet time to boot up.

Engadget - Cray supercomputer is world's fastest (that we're allowed know about)

AP - Oak Ridge boasts fastest computer at open research