• Question: What is the most powerful computer in the world, and what does it do?

    Asked by mudgeon to Gopal on 19 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Gopal Ramchurn

      Gopal Ramchurn answered on 19 Jun 2013:

      The fastest computer ‘right now’ is the Tianhe-2 (Milky Way in English). Your question is very timely since this computer was ranked the fastest just last Monday when it beat the US Titan machine by nearly twice as much in speed! Tianhe-2 was developed in China and has a computation power of 33.86 petaflops per second. In simpler terms, that means 33,860 trillion calculations per second.

      These days, the speed of computers has increased because we have become better of using lots of processors ‘at the same time’ or in parallel. So, you could take a few slow computers, connect them in some way, get them to exchange some messages, and there you go, you have your own super computer… some people actually did that with PlayStation processors and Raspberry Pis!

Comments