Super dork time (Diedra will like this one)
So, I was watching Star Trek today during lunch, and it was the episode where there was a hearing to determine whether or not Data was sentient. Good episode BTW, but that's not the point of this entry. I thought it was interesting when the prosecution asked Data what his total memory and computational speed was. Get this:
He said he had "an ultimate storage capacity of 800 quadrillion bits" and had a "total linear computational speed of 60 trillion operations per second."
Ok, so 800 quadrillion bits is the same as 100 quadrillion bytes, which if we convert that to something modern-day computer users will understand is 100,000 TB (or 100 PB if you're looking that far into the future currently). Currently, a good deal on a 1 TB hard drive is around $300, so it turns out that for a mere $30 million dollars, would could have a computer network with the same storage capacity as Lt. Commander Data.
Then, in terms of processing power, this might shock you a bit. 60 trillion operations per second is the same as saying 60 TFLOPS (a FLOPS is "floating point operations per second", so that's 60 TeraFLOPS). Well, as it turns out, the IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer line was already breaking 60 TFLOPS as of 2004. Currently, the fastest supercomputer in the world is a Blue Gene/L computer that regularly sustains speed of 478 TFLOPS, which is nearly EIGHT TIMES FASTER THAN DATA. The Blue Gene/P computers that will start going into service next year are reported to attain speeds of over 1 PFLOPS (petaFLOPS) or 1,000 TFLOPS, and currently the Folding@Home network is already breaking 1.3 PFLOPS (21.5x faster than Data).
Amazing.
He said he had "an ultimate storage capacity of 800 quadrillion bits" and had a "total linear computational speed of 60 trillion operations per second."
Ok, so 800 quadrillion bits is the same as 100 quadrillion bytes, which if we convert that to something modern-day computer users will understand is 100,000 TB (or 100 PB if you're looking that far into the future currently). Currently, a good deal on a 1 TB hard drive is around $300, so it turns out that for a mere $30 million dollars, would could have a computer network with the same storage capacity as Lt. Commander Data.
Then, in terms of processing power, this might shock you a bit. 60 trillion operations per second is the same as saying 60 TFLOPS (a FLOPS is "floating point operations per second", so that's 60 TeraFLOPS). Well, as it turns out, the IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer line was already breaking 60 TFLOPS as of 2004. Currently, the fastest supercomputer in the world is a Blue Gene/L computer that regularly sustains speed of 478 TFLOPS, which is nearly EIGHT TIMES FASTER THAN DATA. The Blue Gene/P computers that will start going into service next year are reported to attain speeds of over 1 PFLOPS (petaFLOPS) or 1,000 TFLOPS, and currently the Folding@Home network is already breaking 1.3 PFLOPS (21.5x faster than Data).
Amazing.