
e Mother of Invention’s Triplets • 31
more than 100 cores. e spread of multicore processors will be discussed
in greater detail later in this chapter.
As we write this book, the Tianhe-2 supercomputer was unveiled in
China, attaining 33.86 petaops of processing power with a theoretical
peak performance of 54.9 petaops (a petaop is 1015 ops, or FLoating-
point Operations Per Second; the performance of a standard desktop com-
puter is measured in gigaops, one of which is equal to 0.000001 petaop),
toppling the Titan computer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the
United States as the world’s most powerful. Tianhe-2 accomplished this
with ...