The list of the Top 500 fastest supercomputers was released today (it’s compiled and released every 6 months). No big surprises there, at least if you keep up with the big headlines (development such as the Ranger from Sun and Roadrunner from IBM).
Of particular interest are two things.
First, the Top500 organization put together a couple of charts measuring performance over the past 15 years.
It shows a geometric increase over the past decade and a half.
Also, they have an entry regarding power consumption. Unsurprisingly, the closer a system is to the very top, the more efficient it is performance/watts. Thus, the fastest machines are also the most energy efficient.
This can be a result of several developments. First, they are probably more modern and thus were designed with energy conservation in mind. In addition, for the same reason the Airbus 380 is the most efficient passenger plane, so to are multi-core machines. Using virtually the same footprint to deliver 2-3x the performance.
It’s one of the selling points behind IBM’s Kittyhawk program (economies of scale, or in this case, energies of scale).
Also, if Linpack isn’t the benchmark you want to measure performance with, you may be interested in the HPC Performance initiative which has some other metrics.
I think the last version of Netscape that I used was 4.5. From that point on I vowed to never use something that was so buggy or sluggish. From the two years spanning late ‘99 until the winter of ‘01 I used Opera — which is still a mighty find browser (remember when the CEO was going to swim to the US from Norway?).
But I switched to IE 6 for several years due primarily to its ability to render pages properly (i.e., most web designers built around its quirky engine) and because its tight integration into XP made it slightly faster than its competition at the time.
However, in late ‘04 I switched to our open-source friend, Mr. Firefox. I suppose the biggest reason for the change was that it could render pages using a fake IE tag, it had tabs, and was fairly speedy. I haven’t switched back and think that FF is the way to go (I have played around with both IE 7 & 8, neither of which offer much to excite me to change).
Anyways, I started using the latest incarnation, FF 3, back in April with Beta 5. Today, two months later, the final version has been released. I highly recommend using the latest edition, especially if you like stability, security and speed. And hot women.
Oh, and you can be yet another useful statistic. Morocco is creaming the Central African Republic.
Note: about the only major thing that I would change is size of the address bar (entries are too tall). This can easily be reconfigured (see LifeHacker) to look like the older version.
