On 14/06/2011 02:42 PM, Francois Labreque wrote:

>> 2. Why would that be useful? Mainframes are supposedly optimised for I/O
>> performance, not compute performance.
>
> Ever heard of Cray Supercomputers? ;-)

Depending on who you ask, a supercomputer isn't the same thing as a 
mainframe.

When I was at the London Science Museum, I had a chance to see a Cray 2 
supercomputer. According to Wikipedia, this was the fastest computer on 
Earth when it was first built, managing to achieve a peak performance of 
about 1.9 GFLOPS.

...which sounds like a lot, until you realise that the Cray 2 originally 

US) which produces about 2,488 GFLOPS.

(Also: Trying to get GFLOPS ratings for recent CPUs is like trying to 
find gold dust!)

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