So. Do you think your computer is fast? What about those dual-core processors we expect to see from AMD and Intel this year? Honestly, they sound pretty badass - as far as home computing goes. But imagine owning a computer with 131,072 processor cores! The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory expects to have one by next year, courtesy of IBM. (Cost: $100 million)

The following excerpts come from an article in Maximum PC magazine by Tom R. Halfhill.

"IBM has dazzled the not-easily-impressed scientific community by breaking the world speed record with its new BlueGene/L supercomputer. BlueGene/L scored a whopping 70.72 trillion floating-point operations per second (teraflops) on the Linpack benchmark...And BlueGene/L isn't even finished. It's a working prototype... (that) has only one-forth as many processors as envisioned for the finished system."

Sounds awesome! So what are the stats? How does it work? We want to know more!

"BlueGene/L plods along at 700Mhz. It's a great example of how multiprocessing can deliver superior performance without resorting to stratospheric clock frequencies.

...BlueGene/L has other oddities. It's based on a 5-year old 32-bit PowerPC 440 processor core previously found only in chips for embedded applications, like networking equipment. It's a sound design, but not as advanced as the latest Pentium 4 or Athlon 64. It doesn't even have a floating-point unit (FPU), a requirement for scientific computing. IBM had to graft a newly designed FPU onto the PowerPC 440 to make it suitable for a supercomputer.

At the same time, IBM integrated two PowerPC 440 cores on one chip, just as AMD and Intel are doing with their dual-core chips. But whereas AMD and Intel will manufacture their dual-core wonders with the latest 90-nanometer fabrication technology, IBM is making BlueGene/L chips with an old-hat 0.13-micron process.

The secret to BlueGene/L's success is massive parallelism. The finished supercomputer will have 65,536 dual-core chips with 131,072 processor cores. They're linked by five independent wiring networks for control signals and data. Remarkably, one network runs at 1.4Ghz, making BlueGene/L the first processor I know of that drives an I/O interface faster than the CPU core. Usually, I/O runs slower than the core.

BlueGene/L's massively parallel system architecture isn't easily imitated by PCs. Very little PC software has the parallelism inherent in many scientific applications. Nevertheless, IBM's multicore, multiprocessor, multinetwork supercomputer contains important clues about the future of general-purpose computing."

Aha! So multi-core processing is future of home computing? Well, obviously, judging by the dual-core cpus being released soon. Will more focus in the future be diverted towards making desktops with more processor cores, as opposed to increasing individual core performance? What, in the long run, is a more cost effective way for companies like Intel and AMD to create large performance increases in their products? We know that, right now, the big thing for home computing is 64-bit. Perhaps massive parallelism will be the next big thing.

As well, 70.72 TFLOPS may sound huge now, but the finished BlueGene/L is expected to perform as many as 360 TFLOPS!!! It should be noted though, that BlueGene/L is a supercomputer, meaning: it's huge. Obviously, current technology isn't going to allow 65,000 processors to be jammed into your desktop PC. But wouldn't THAT be cool?