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posted by cmn32480 on Monday July 20 2015, @07:33PM   Printer-friendly
from the does-it-run-windows? dept.

Currently, the world's most powerful supercomputers can ramp up to more than a thousand trillion operations per second, or a petaflop. But computing power is not growing as fast as it has in the past. On Monday, the June 2015 listing of the Top 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world revealed the beginnings of a plateau in performance growth.
...
The development rate began tapering off around 2008. Between 2010 and 2013, aggregate increases ranged between 26 percent and 66 percent. And on this June's list, there was a mere 17 percent increase from last November.
...
Despite the slowdown, many computational scientists expect performance to reach exascale, or more than a billion billion operations per second, by 2020.

Hmm, if they reach exascale computing will the weatherman finally be able to predict if it's going to rain this afternoon? Because he sucks at that now.


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Monday July 20 2015, @09:04PM

    by Beryllium Sphere (r) (5062) on Monday July 20 2015, @09:04PM (#211577)

    Data are limited and uncertain, and the system goes through periods when small changes have big results.

    One cool thing meteorologists do is run the same model repeatedly with inputs slightly off from the reported ones. If the output is pretty much the same, they know that they're in an interval where butterfly wings damp out to nothing, and extended forecasts become potentially reliable.

    That said, weather forecasts are remarkable today. Jokes about them are leftovers from the middle of the last century.

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  • (Score: 2) by fritsd on Monday July 20 2015, @09:26PM

    by fritsd (4586) on Monday July 20 2015, @09:26PM (#211592) Journal

    Everybody seems to remember chaos theory for Jeff Goldblum's crazy role in "Jurassic Park", but almost nobody seems to remember what it actually means :-(

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Tork on Monday July 20 2015, @10:53PM

      by Tork (3914) Subscriber Badge on Monday July 20 2015, @10:53PM (#211640)
      It meant: "Audience, you need to both believe that the scientists at Jurassic Park are really really smart and that the dinos are going to get out of control and eat people anyway."
      --
      🏳️‍🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️‍🌈