Look, here's the deal. There is NO POSSIBLE WAY this will happen. See, the energies the LHC is producing are occuring NATURALLY, EVERY DAY when the earth is struck by high-energy gamma rays. If this sort of thing were going to happen in the LHC, it would have ALREADY HAPPEND NATURALLY.
So please, people, put down the crack pipe and let the scientists do their stuff so we can more fully understand the universe.
Soon we'll be measuring in petaflops (1,000,000,000,000,000 flops)!
To put this into a greater perspective, a Core 2 Duo processor puts out a *theoretical maximum* 4 flops per clock (per core, or 8 flops per clock for both) and runs somewhere between 1.8GHz and 2.66GHz.
That means that an average (2GHz) processor operating at theoretical peak efficiency (and for various reasons this never actually happens in real life, and the Top500 scores are actually measured with a tool called Linpack that calculates closer to real performance), your average Core 2 Duo processor would put out about 16 gigaflops. Real performance probably peaks at about 70-80% of that, which means about 12-13 gigaflops.
So... 1,900,000,000 flops -- Cray-2 supercomputer (1985) 12,000,000,000 flops -- average Core 2 duo performance 94,210,000,000,000 flops -- MareNostrum (#5) 360,000,000,000,000 flops -- Blue Gene/L (#1) 1,000,000,000,000,000 flops -- one petaflop.
As you can see the top cluster systems are thousands of times more powerful than your average desktop system, and your desktop system has the advantage of not having to actually talk to the other systems to achieve that performance! These clusters take a performance hit from the individual nodes having to talk to each other.
Anyway, supercomputing has come a long way but still has plenty of room to grow.
So please, people, put down the crack pipe and let the scientists do their stuff so we can more fully understand the universe.
To put this into a greater perspective, a Core 2 Duo processor puts out a *theoretical maximum* 4 flops per clock (per core, or 8 flops per clock for both) and runs somewhere between 1.8GHz and 2.66GHz.
That means that an average (2GHz) processor operating at theoretical peak efficiency (and for various reasons this never actually happens in real life, and the Top500 scores are actually measured with a tool called Linpack that calculates closer to real performance), your average Core 2 Duo processor would put out about 16 gigaflops. Real performance probably peaks at about 70-80% of that, which means about 12-13 gigaflops.
So...
1,900,000,000 flops -- Cray-2 supercomputer (1985)
12,000,000,000 flops -- average Core 2 duo performance
94,210,000,000,000 flops -- MareNostrum (#5)
360,000,000,000,000 flops -- Blue Gene/L (#1)
1,000,000,000,000,000 flops -- one petaflop.
As you can see the top cluster systems are thousands of times more powerful than your average desktop system, and your desktop system has the advantage of not having to actually talk to the other systems to achieve that performance! These clusters take a performance hit from the individual nodes having to talk to each other.
Anyway, supercomputing has come a long way but still has plenty of room to grow.
That seems totally insane to me.
Are these people on crack?