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Old 06-06-2016, 01:31 AM   #2
NN5I
Carl, nn5i
 
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Join Date: Sep 2011
Location: Tallahassee, FL
Posts: 1,441
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Peta is 1000 tera.

I've been responsible for some pretty large mainframe systems, in the teraflops range, but none in the petaflops range. "Flops", by the way, is "floating point operations per second", an obsolescent measure of CPU speed. Petaflops would be faster than anything there was, I think, in 2001 when I retired -- even at NSA.

Quite a trick, by the way, dividing a surface into cubes of any size.

I'm a little incredulous of those two-foot-diameter cooling-water tubes, too. Two inches, maybe; or perhaps those could have been cooling-air conduits. Of course my experience is 15 years old, which in the supercomputer world as in the PC world is a long time. But super-high speed is achieved mostly by making the internal parts (transistors and such) smaller, so I can't imagine that there'd be any place to use the amount of liquid coolant carried by a two-foot pipe. I'd guess that the two-foot tubes, if any, would carry chilled air to heat exchangers inside the cabinet, which in turn would cool a liquid (probably distilled water) that then cooled the circuitry.

Distilled water, which has a very high volume specific heat, is a better coolant than any other liquid -- about twice as good as, for example, liquid mercury. If you could build car engines with stainless-steel blocks. and make efficient stainless-steel radiators, pumps etc., distilled water would be a better coolant than any water-and-glycol mixture. Water is amazing stuff.
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