Alex Reid

IBM and Los Alamos National Laboratory have built the world’s first petaflop machine. A petaflop is equal to one thousand trillion calculations per second.

The supercomputer, called Roadrunner, is designed to run “complex nuclear weapons calculations“. IBM says such a computer could also be used by the pharmaceutical industry to simulate the effect of drugs on the human body, or by Wall Street to simulate the impact of events on the stock market.

Roadrunner cost about $100 million and combines 6,948 dual-core AMD Opteron chips and 12,960 Cell engines, all housed in IBM blade servers. Eighty terabytes of memory are kept in 288 “refrigerator-sized” racks occupying 6,000 square feet. It was loaded onto 21 tractor trailer trucks from New York to Los Alamos and weighs 500,000 pounds.

It has 10,000 Infiniband and Gigabit Ethernet connections requiring 57 miles of fiber optic cable. Roadrunner uses open source Linux software from Red Hat and is more efficient than most supercomputers, delivering 376 million calculations per watt, according to IBM.

Reading up on interesting domain name semantic stats.

The most popular registered domain name length is 11 characters long. Hmm.. like NewWinnipeg.

Cam introduced me to Su Doku, a logic game featuring a 9×9 grid on Saturday night. You have to complete it so that every row, column and cube contains the digits 1-9.

I spent five or six hours playing it on Saturday night and another three or four hours last night. I’m so addicted to this game.

 

 

In the example above, the green box is where a 5 would go since the other fives rest on the red lines.

Bizarrely, I found OTTFFSSEN scrawled on my arm after a night of drinking and socializing. While many friends are sure this is a sign of madness, I am happily amused to break my own riddle.

Despite being incredibly blotto, I found that all English numbers can only start with one of six English letters (O T F S E N). There is One; Two, Three, Ten; Four & Five; Six & Seven; Eight & Eleven and Nine. After that it simply replicates with Twelve & Thirteen.. Twenty & Thirty.. and One hundred.

The only word that these unique letters make up is “soften” – according to magswordfinder.com.

It may not mean anything, but the presence of “six” letters does.

Six recurring nines appear in the decimal places 762 through 767 of the transcendental pi. Nines are absolutely the top number, not just because it’s the highest single number, but becaue every number is evenly divisible by nine if and only if the iterative sum of its digits reduces to 9. This is equivalent to saying a number is divisible by 9 if and only if its decimal digit total is divisible by 9.