Supercomputer Advancement Slows? 86
kgeiger writes "In the Feb. 2011 issue of IEEE Spectrum online, Peter Kogge, an IEEE Fellow and professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Notre Dame, outlines why we won't see exaflops computers soon. To start with, consuming 67 MW (an optimistic estimate) is going to make a lot of heat. He concludes, 'So don't expect to see a supercomputer capable of a quintillion operations per second appear anytime soon. But don't give up hope, either. [...] As long as the problem at hand can be split up into separate parts that can be solved independently, a colossal amount of computing power could be assembled similar to how cloud computing works now. Such a strategy could allow a virtual exaflops supercomputer to emerge. It wouldn't be what DARPA asked for in 2007, but for some tasks, it could serve just fine.'"
Re:How about those limited edition Gallium chips?? (Score:4, Informative)
A little bird informs the world that the US has a supercomputer already running on them, somewhere between 100Ghz-1Thz per processor
Unlikely. If you do the calculations, you'll find that the current 3GHz limit is about as fast as you can get data from other chips on a circuit board. 3GHz is 0.33 nanoseconds period, the time it takes for light to travel ten centimeters in a vacuum. A faster CPU will stay idle most of the time, waiting for the data it requested from other chips to arrive at the speed of light.