Some people love numbers. My husband, Frank, adores numbers. If you ask him what the largest number is, he will say, “Infinity plus one.” It does not bother Frank at all to discuss infinity.
On the other hand, I have my limits. Infinity is way too large. I draw the line at a gazillion.
So, here is the deal right up front. Petaflops is a term that has to do with numbers and how computers deal with numbers. Read on at your own risk!
Petaflops are best dealt with when broken down into syllabic parts. Peta- is a prefix that stands for a quadrillion units of measure. Other such prefixes that are more familiar include giga- (from the Greek gigas which means giant) and tera- (from the Greek teras which means monster). Giga- means a billion of something and tera- means a trillion of something. A terabyte is a gigantically monstrously large amount of bytes- a trillion bytes(remember that 1 byte equals 8 bits, so a terabyte would be 8 trillion bits of data).
A quadrillion is a million billion (1,000,000,000,000,000). It is a mind-bogglingly large number, but it is still smaller than infinity plus one! A petaflop, therefore, is a quadrillion FLOPS.
FLOPS stands for FLoating-point OPerations per second. It is a term that refers to arithmetic operations like addition and multiplication. In the case of computers these “operations” would involve the addition or multiplication of very large numbers.
In the world of the “Real Number System” there is an INFINITE set of rational numbers as Frank likes to point out. In fact, there is a number between any two Real Numbers with an INFINITE number of decimal points. In the world of computers every number must be assigned a specific FINITE value and so every number is rounded to the closest
value. Therefore, computer arithmetic is designated as FLOATING-POINT arithmetic. Calculations done by computers are called FLoating-point OPerations.
A petaflop is a quadrillion FLoating-point OPerations (a quadrillion computer arithmetic calculations) per second.
Frank loves this stuff!
Why do I even bring up petaflops anyway? Well, here’s the latest news.
In 1999 IBM announced the “Blue Gene” project to be completed in 2004. “Blue Gene” is a supercomputer that can perform at petaflop speed.
Each “Blue Gene” processor will be able to perform at gigaflop speed (1 billion operations per second). There will be 32 processors on each “Blue Gene” computer chip. There will be 2 foot by 2 foot boards that each has 64 of these ultra-fast chips. There will be 8 boards on each 6 foot high rack. All together there will be 64 interconnected racks to give “Blue Gene” the ability to perform at the speed of one quadrillion operations per second, one petaflop.
If “Blue Gene” was tasked to download the entire amount of information on the Internet it would take one second at that speed.
Due to this incredible speed, “Blue Gene” will be put to work helping scientists understand protein folding. The Human Genome Project has recently mapped all of the human genes or DNA. Scientists can identify the amino acids or protein building blocks that are coded for with each gene. The “Blue Gene” project will go one step further to determine what three-dimensional shape the amino acids will take when they are stuck together to make up a protein in the body.
The function of a protein in the body is determined by its shape. Disease states are created by proteins that cannot function properly because they do not have the right shape. Information from the “Blue Gene” project could lead to disease treatments that result in replacing the misshapen protein with a properly shaped and functional protein.
This marriage of computers and the human body is called “Computational Biology.” I will never understand it all, but I’ll just have to keep working at it until infinity plus one.
So, what comes after “Blue Gene?” Gigamopsy, Teraflopsy and Peta RabbitComputational Literature?