Scary fast computers

[tigertoy]

From a release on NVidia's web site, that I clicked through from a news page:
"The Tesla GPU features 128 parallel processors, and delivers up to 518 gigaflops of parallel computation."

Unless I'm misreading something, that's half a teraflop on a single chip.

I'm in the middle of Charles Stross' Accelerando. The things he projects about the amount of computing power available seem less far fetched today than they did yesterday somehow.

Comments

[erik]

Yes. But it's a very focused half a teraflop; It's a GPU, designed to quickly do graphics...from the press release I'm not clear if this power will be available to the general hardware for doing other things.

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

The press release clearly states that it's being marketed for scientific calculation, rather than for graphics, and asserts that they provide software support for generalized supercomuter use.

Time will tell, but if it's a real product, I might be playing with one myself -- I work in a lab that develops geochemistry software, one of the areas they specifically mention as an application.