What is the most powerful generation of computer?

Answer 1

In simple terms, the most powerful generation of computers will always be the latest generation of computers. Supercomputers are at the top in terms of sheer processing power, followed by mainframes, desktop microcomputers, mobile microcomputers and mobile telephones at the bottom. There is little point in comparing these with each other as their measure of power is relative to their purpose. You can't carry a supercomputer around with you, so a mobile phone is more powerful in that respect, but it cannot predict the weather.

However, there is a type of computer that is potentially way more powerful than any supercomputer ever built. These aren't self-contained computers in the traditional sense, they are actually a network of individual computers that work in parallel towards a common goal. This is known as distributed computing, or grid computing, and the internet is a prime example (it is the largest network in the world, after all).

Without getting too technical, the Internet is a distributed network of discrete computers. The backbone of the Internet is handled by a handful of servers providing essential services such as DNS. However, subnets (including ISPs) mirror these servers activities, thus distributing the workload throughout the network. This ensures reliability as there is no reliance on any one computer. However, every computer that has Internet access is also part of that network and therefore has potential to contribute towards the workload. Thus it is not unusual for an organisation to maintain its own DNS, for instance.

However, we can take the principal one stage further. With literally millions of separate computers all connected to the same network, there is a potentially enormous amount of processing power available. While you're reading this, take a look at your CPU activity. Unless you're running an intensive process in the background the idle process will often indicate 90% or more, which means you're only utilising about 10% of your computer's potential processing power. If you do a lot of browsing and very little else why not put that 90% to good use?

If you add up all the machines connected to the Internet at any one time, it's a safe bet that around 90% of them are idle. Distributed computing can take advantage of this potential processing power to solve highly complex problems or analyse data in a fraction of the time it would take just one computer by itself.

The most famous distributed computing project is probably the SETI@home project -- the search for extra terrestrial intelligence. While there have been projects that might be considered more useful (such as the search for a cure for cancer), the SETI project serves as a good example of the potential processing power available. Although active users are only in the region of 100,000 or so (100,000 processors, if you like), the average performance is reckoned to be in the region of 505 teraFLOP/s.

A FLOP is a floating-point operation and a teraFLOP is 1012 floating point operations. So 505 teraFLOP/s is 505,000,000,000,000 FLOP per second. While this is well short of the IBM Sequoia's estimated 16.32 PFLOP/s (1015 FLOPs), do bear in mind that 100,000 active users is just a small fraction of the Internet's total user base, and that the actual processing is only done during idle time. Therefore the potential processing power available is enormous, far surpassing that of the IBM Sequoia, the world's fastest supercomputer.
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