The sophistication and complexity of computing is fascinating. It was the highest mark I got in University ~ and that was card punching and tape reading! Now we're talking gigaflops here. And no I'm not exactly sure what that term represents other that a very very large number. I have excerpted below from an article in GIZMAG on the latest developments in supercomputing ~ for general consumption ~ this is not the industrial strength data management center ~ the supercomputer for everyone.
"It's perhaps more realistic to think of Parallella as a highly efficient piece of parallel computer engineering rather than a supercomputer. Though the term supercomputer is ill-defined, the word tends to conjure images of room-filling, petaflop-crunching mainframes (though the term mainframe is hardly more concrete). This ain't that.
What it is, though, is a powerful parallel computer complete with Adapteva's 16-core Epiphany-III processor which the company claims is capable of 32 GFLOPS peak performance while consuming no more than 2 watts of electrical power. The company claims that a Parallella has "10–50 times more performance" than the Raspberry Pi. If 16 cores sounds impressive then consider that, had Adapteva reached its stretch goal of $3 million, then its aim was to ship 64-core Epiphany-IV-based Parallellas come May 2013. In any case its development roadmap leads to 1000-core processors come 2014."
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