Presto Electro

I just read an article about one of UNT's latest advancements in the field of super computing. As per usual when I read about super computing, my mind immediately wanders off to a small island off the coast of Costa Rica and I start to imagine commingling frog and dinosaur DNA.

I read Jurassic Park cover-to-cover a lot when I was a kid. Like most kids, I was fascinated by pretty much every portion of the book, but I still remember one specific detail to this day: the Crays. Michael Crichton really dwelled on the Cray X-MP supercomputers that were behind the park's operations, and to this day I still kinda believe that supercomputers are magical machines that can do the impossible.

As it turns out, the Cray X-MP cannot do magic. By today's standards, it can't even keep up with high-tech toys. At its best, the Cray operates at approximately half the processing power of an Xbox--not an Xbox 360 mind you, just a regular Xbox. Needless to say, the magical Crays of that era can't compare to a modern day Pentium Processor.

As it happens, UNT has a super computing cluster of its own for computationally intensive research. The Talon Research High-Performance Computing System is a supercomputing cluster made up of 224 computers. Each one of these computers has a pair of quad-core Pentium processors. Each one of the cores of these processors possesses more computing power than the Cray X-MP could ever dream of. It's pretty awesome.