Bonus: The new Mac Pro has graphics with up to 56 teraflops of computing power, how is that different from a small supercomputer with 56 teraflops
In: Technology
Plenty of people have defined flops, so I won’t re-explain that.
But the main differences between a 56-teraflop GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) and a 56-teraflop supercomputer are, among others:
* GPUs are a bunch of tiny processors working at the same time; that’s a good strategy for doing things with graphics, but there are a lot of problems that can’t be solved with that strategy. A supercomputer will be a lot better at those problems, because it’s using fast individual processors rather than a bunch of less-fast processors at the same time.
* For a lot of tasks, how fast you can get data to and from the processor matters a lot. A lot of what makes supercomputers fast is that the data exchanges between components are screamingly fast compared to what your desktop/etc. can handle.
However, for some tasks — things that are large numbers of discrete operations, like 3D modeling or protein folding or the like — they’re pretty comparable. Scientific tasks that are well-suited to that kind of processing are already run on farms of PCs with fast GPUs instead of supercomputers, because it costs a lot less per teraflop to do it that way. But there are still a lot of analysis tasks that don’t work well in that sort of system, and that’s why people still buy supercomputers.
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