IBM has just finished construction of the worlds fastest super computer, The Jaguar, clocking in at 1.1.05 petaflops and 362 terabytes of memory. Cray Computer has also recently finished a peta scale computer clocking in at 1.059 petaflops. A petaflop is a measure of a computer's processing speed and can be expressed as a quadrillion or a thousand trillion floating point operations per second.That is 1,000,000,000,000,000 floating point calculations per second.FLOPS are floating-point operations per second. Floating-point is considered to be a method of encoding real numbers within the limits of finite precision available on computers.Using floating-point encoding, extremely long numbers can be handled relatively easily. A floating-point number is expressed as a basic number, an exponent, and a number base which is usually ten but may also be 2.So why is this important. Well it opens up a whole new avenue of geeky and scientific things like more precise climate simulation, folding protein simulation, simulating performance of SCRAMJET engines, and playing a mean game of chess. more about "Building the worlds fastest computer", posted with vodpod