I recently read about IBM’s Sequoia supercomputer that will be operational in 2011. It will perform 20 Peta FLOPS and have 1.6 Peta bytes of RAM. To put that in perspective: if it were to attempt to simulation a human cerebral cortex it would be able to allocate 50 bytes of RAM and 700 calculations [...]
Remember when I was raving about nVidia’s new GTX 280 graphics card that crunches 1 Tera FLOPS?
Yeah, well, that was 3 weeks ago.
Today, Radeon’s new HD 4870 X2 graphics card has 1600 stream processors that crunch 2.4 Tera FLOPS.
If Roadrunner is a bit beyond your budget, simulating neural networks with GPUs might be an option:
The next generation of Nvidia GPUs will support enhancements such as double precision floating point in order to make them more suitable for general purpose highly parallel computation. There will also be cards with no graphics interface [...]