GIMPS allows us to use some unfamiliar prefixes. For instance, we
are much cheered by our recent landmark of exceeding 1 trillion
operations per second, 1 teraflops. Consider the total floating point
operations performed by GIMPS. We finished our first petaflop
(quadrillion floating point operations) within a few days of its
inception,
and finished our first quintillion floating point operations (exaflop)
in
May of 1998.
The milestone we cross this week is 50 quintillion floating
point operations, or 50 exaflop. Growing at our current
rate, we should get our next prefix, the zettaflop, or sextillion
operations per second (ya gotta love the sound of that, sextillion)
around November 2007.
Then, the next prefix, for 1 septillion flops or yottaflop, would
occur sometime in 2016, with some pretty optimistic growth
assumptions perhaps. {8-] spike
_________________________________________________________________________
Unsubscribe & list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm
Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.exu.ilstu.edu/mersenne/faq-mers.txt
