Laptops to hit teraFLOP levels by 2015

Laptops will be capable of a teraFLOP of processing power by 2015, according to a leader in high power computing at the International Supercomputer Conference (ISC) in Dresden today.

Announcing the Top500 supercomputer sites in the world, Dr Erich Strohmaier of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory predicted that single socket computers - such as laptops and PCs - will have performance levels of one teraFLOP by 2015.

It may sound like a lot, but he noted it takes 18 years for the top technology in high performance computing (HPC) systems to filter down to everyday computers. "By 2015, entry level in the top 500 will be about one petaFLOP," he added.

And forget dual-core. By 2020, a laptop could have as many as a thousand cores - ideal for increasing digital security needs, Strohmaier said.

"The switch from single core to multicore to manycore is a paradigm change which will change how we do everything," he said.

HPC will have hundreds of millions of cores by that year, he added.

The top supercomputing sites in the world are dominated by the US, with the top system listed as the IMB BlueGene system at the National Nuclear Security Administration in Livermore, California, with benchmark performances of about 280 teraFLOPS a second.

The top system in Europe is an IBM JS21 cluster at the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre in Spain, which was ranked ninth overall at 62.63 TFLOPS/sec.

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