Seven Wonders of the IT World

CIO has a neat write up about the Seven Wonders of the IT World. For example:

World's fastest supercomputer:
IBM BlueGene/L (BGL)

Powered by: 65,536 dual-processor computer nodes.

Home base: This 2,500-square-foot marvel lives at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif.

Claim to fame: Helps researchers answer physics questions about stockpiled nuclear weapons and materials like Plutonium.

Power requirements: 1.5 megawatts (equivalent to a 2,000-horsepower diesel engine).

Clocked speed: Rated fastest in the world after clocking sustained performance of 280.6 trillion operations per second, or teraflops.

Approximate cost: As part of a larger contract including other supercomputers, just under $100 million.

Measure of compute capability: To match the power of this behemoth, every man, woman and child on Earth would need to perform 60,000 calculations per second (without transposing digits or forgetting to "carry the one").

Brawny bandwidth: Its internal communication network would support 150 simultaneous phone conversations for every person in the United States.

http://www.cio.com/article/print/135700 - via metafilter