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What Is This? Discover's Server Room?

Hint: First it flopped. Then it megaflopped.

By Andrew Grant
Aug 10, 2010 5:00 AMNov 12, 2019 4:12 AM
illiac.jpg
Mark Richards | NULL

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ANSWER: ILLIAC IV SUPERCOMPUTER

ILLIAC IV was a pioneering but infamous supercomputer that started up in 1974 after years of delays and cost overruns. It achieved speeds of over 100 million flops (floating point operations per second). By comparison, today's fastest supercomputer, the National Center for Computational Science's Jaguar, does 10 million times better.

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