The fact of crunching only one project at a time is to reach for certain symbolic badges (gold, sapphire) quicker.
If you have a slow machine and say only one machine and not devoted to WCG, if you start crunching across the whole spectrum you will never reach a gold or sapphire badge as the project will probably end before.
Now all this is for sure is not really very important but it is the fun part of it.

If we look at the TOP 500 supercomputer list, in it's November 2009 updated list (it is done twice a year, next in June 2010) we see that the world record holder is the Oak Ridge National Labs.
Their machine is a Jaguar Cray XT5-HE with AMD x86_64 Opteron Six Core 2600 MHz (10.4 GFlops) CPU's. They pack 224'162 cores and the machine has a sustained performance of 1'759 Teraflops or 1.759 Petaflops. Peak performance is 2.331 Petaflops.
Power consumption is nearly 7 MW. You need a power station for that.
I will not try to calculate how many points or WU's per day such a machine could produce, but here one single machine can do 4 times WCG as a whole.

Nobody can afford such a machine in terms of cost (investment and maintenance plus power) and most of all, offer it for free full time devoted to WCG.

But with the grid computing paradigm WCG can afford for free a machine that ranks 11th in the World (415 Teraflop with 147'456 cores, 1.13 MW) and this is equivalent to an IBM Blue Gene computer owned by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Thanks to all of you we have achieved an outstanding success.


http://www.top500.org

Maybe from here Sek if there is enough patience who knows :D , bye bye all other supercomputers !!


Blue Waters



Blue Waters is expected to be the most powerful supercomputer in the world for open scientific research when it comes online in 2011. It will be the first system of its kind to sustain one petaflop performance on a range of science and engineering applications. ( read more here )

The Illinois Petascale Computing Facilitythat will house Blue Waters will have 100 gigabits per second (Gb/s) connectivity. That is about 20,000 times faster than a common U.S. home connection of 5.1 Mb/s. So a DVD (of about 5 GB) would take about 35 minutes to download at home and about 40 seconds over PCF's base connectivity.

Computing system Blue Waters will deliver sustained performance of 1 petaflop (1 quadrillion calculations every second) for many science and engineering applications. That's not on benchmarks—that's for real codes that researchers use every day.
The configuration of Blue Waters was determined by assessing the needs of various grand challenge science and engineering problems. Based on input from researchers, the system will feature:
Powerful cores with 12 execution units, so fewer cores are required to achieve petascale performance.
A new high-bandwidth, low-latency interconnect, to facilitate scaling to large numbers of cores.
A high-peformance eight-channel memory subsystem, to enable the solution of memory-intensive problems.
A high-performance I/O subsystem, to enable the solution of data-intensive problems.
High reliability, to ensure that the most challenging problems can be addressed.
Blue Waters is based on POWER7 hardware and a powerful new system design from IBM. The base system and computing environment will be enhanced through a multi-year collaboration among NCSA, the University of Illinois, IBM, and members of the Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation The enhanced environment will increase the productivity of application developers, system administrators, and researchers by providing an integrated toolset to use Blue Waters and analyze and control its behavior.
This configuration will be:
Very powerful, with a number of applications capable of achieving more than one petaflop of performance.
Effective, with researchers able to get the results they need when they need them.
Reliable, with the system running 24 hours a day, seven days a week and recovering from hardware failures without losing data or halting calculations.
Consistent, delivering accurate results and completing jobs in the promised and expected amount of time.


This are just some facts , more in the website


regards

Sunday topped Saturday, it almost always does, but at 310 CPU years it topped any previous Sunday at that adding another 384 TFL to the total on our way to the next threshold of a dream.