Years ago I followed the dramatic increase in commercial computing power, tracking the "race" between the US and Japan. I pretty much forgot all about that race until this story.
BP has begun building a new supercomputing complex for commercial research that it claims will be the biggest in the world at its Westlake Campus in Houston, the company reported Friday.
The project is designed to keep BP at the forefront of seismic imaging technology and, the firm said, will be a critical tool in its global hunt for oil and natural gas in coming years.
BP's existing HPC center was the world's first commercial research center to achieve a petaFLOP of processing speed (or one thousand trillion calculations per second). But the company said that this has now reached maximum power and cooling capacity in its current space at the Westlake Campus.
The new center will be housed in a three-story, 110,000-square foot facility. Equipped with more than 67,000 CPUs, it is expected to have the ability to process data at a rate of up to two petaFLOPS.
Currently, the world's fastest supercomputer is the non-commercial Cray Titan – which is used for scientific projects at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and was built with funding from the US Department of Energy. The Titan has a processing speed of 17.59 petaFLOPS.One almost wonders what the US intelligence community computers can do.
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