Petascale computing

The Washington Post recently reported on Roadrunner [1].

The first “petascale” supercomputer will be capable of 1,000 trillion calculations per second. That’s about twice as powerful as today’s dominant model, a basketball-court-size beast known as BlueGene at the Energy Department’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California that performs a peak of 596 trillion calculations per second.

A leading candidate to become the first petascale machine, the “Roadrunner” supercomputer being developed by IBM in partnership with the Energy Department’s Los Alamos National Laboratory, will require about 4 megawatts of power

These computers will be able to:

• predict the effect of an earthquake on every building in downtown Los Angeles (for example)
• help assess the reliability, safety, security and performance of weapons in the US nuclear stockpile
• see what happens when stars explode into supernovas and die
• provide a more refine analysis of experimental drugs
• model viruses and see how it might evolve

May be more importantly, it might be used to understand what those inventive minds on Wall Street are doing as they derive questionable loans into high-value investment vehicles, that, when the bottom falls out, trashes the investment portfolios of millions. Not that I have an opinion on this point. As it would seem the government is unwilling to maintain its own governance responsibilities in protection of the general public of such questionable activities, it seems it would fall on the private sector to initiate action.