Petaflop

So the new IBM BlueGene/P has been proved to run at 3 Petaflops, or 3 Quadrillion operations a second (although in real life situations, it's designed to run at 1 petaflop). Now that is a lot. Some of the numbers are mind blowing.

4 - the number of PowerPC cores in each chip running at 850MHz each.
32 - a 2x2 foot circuit board can contain this number of chips
435 billion - the number of operations a single board can handle a second
32 (again) - the number of these boards that fit into a 6 foot rack
72 - the number of these racks required to hit a single petaflop
216 - the number of racks to hit 3 petaflops (which is 884,736 processors)

Big numbers. However, the image in my head of how large it is this:

If you stacked up a pile of Thinkpads to give you same power, you'd end up with a pile of 1.5 miles high.

Like I said - big numbers.