We all know a PC, probably heard of supercomputers. But mainframes are not so known. When you watch television and see a movie with a big machine, or hear people talking to each other (at college) about a mainframe do you sometimes wonder what that is? What they are talking about?
Then this page is intended for you. This page is the first to explain what a mainframe is and how i evolved in my student history. Who were the pioneers and what companies were, and still are, involved. How did and how do they look like? On this page are a few pictures of my earliest mainframes works at the university.
How fast is a petaflop?
One petaflop also equals 150,000 computations for every human on the planet per second. The Sequoia is a petascale IBM Blue Gene/Q supercomputer with 20 petaflops, which equates to an astounding 3 million computations by every human on the planet each second. To put this number into perspective, if each of the 6.7 billion people on earth had a hand calculator and worked together on a calculation 24 hours per day, 365 days a year, it would take 320 years to do what Sequoia will do in one hour.