For Media

SDSC: San Diego Supercomputer Center
Established: November 14, 1985
Employees: 400

Web site: www.sdsc.edu

Leadership: Dr. Francine Berman, director

High-performance computers:

IBM BlueGene eServer, which provides 17.2 teraflops of compute power
IBM DataStar, which offers 15.6 teraflops of compute power
TeraGrid Cluster, which offers 4.1 teraflops Linux cluster that is part of the national TeraGrid distributed platform
25 petabytes of archival data storage capacity and 1.4 petabytes of online disk storage

The anatomy of a byte:

Byte: A unit of computer information equal to one typed character.
Megabyte: A million bytes and equal in size to a short novel.
Terabyte: A trillion bytes or about equal to the information printed on paper made from 50,000 trees
Petabyte: A quadrillion bytes; the information found in all US academic libraries could be stored on two petabytes
Exabyte: One quintillion bytes; every word ever spoken by humans could be stored on five exabytes

Rating a computers performance :

Megaflops: A million floating point operations oer second; the original Cray-1 supercomputer was capable of 80 megaflops
Gigaflops: A billion floating point operations per second; today's personal computers are capable of gigaflops performance
Teraflops: A trillion (10¹²) floating point operations per second; the fastest supercomputers in the world are capable of achieving teraflops performance
Petaflops: A quadrillion (10¹⁵) floating point operations per second; a frontier goal in computing expected within the next couple years

Some common uses for supercomputers: