Bitcoin network out-muscles top 500 supercomputers
Is the bitcoin network the most powerful distributed computing system -- hence, the most powerful computer, period -- on Earth? Maybe, although the designation comes marked with a few asterisks. According to Bitcoin Charts, which tracks activity on the distributed global network of bitcoin mining computers, the network has achieved a hashrate (the rate at which new blocks of bitcoins are mined) of 1039.79 petaflops, or more than 1 exaflops. As The Genesis Block points out, that's more than eight times the performance level of the world's 500 most powerful supercomputers. (A few notes on....
Related News
The ultra-resilient bitcoin network is the world's largest distributing computing project in terms of raw computational power, having long ago surpassed 1 exaFLOPS (1,000 petaFLOPS) - over eight times the combined speed of the top 500 supercomputers. Although since increasing to an amazing 3.2 zettaFLOPS (3,200 exaFLOPS), the project was quietly removed from Wikipedia's list of distributed computing projects. This is probably due to the fact that the exaFLOPS estimate breaks down with bitcoin's specialized ASICs, since they are not capable of floating-point operations. Instead, the....
Supercomputers are ultrahigh-performance machines that crunch numbers at dazzling speeds in order to advance research in aerospace, climate science, fundamental physics and cosmology, genomics, and medicine — not to mention more mundane applications like big data and financial analysis. Supercomputing research in the U.S. received a boost with the National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI), introduced in 2015 to advance “exascale” supercomputers capable of performing a quintillion operations a second (30 times faster than today’s fastest computer), or one exaflop, by 2025. Of course....
Following a document trail that claimed high-performance computing firm SGI was partnering with Craig Wright and his supercomputer firm, Cloudcroft Supercomputers, SGI has now denied any relationship with alleged Bitcoin creator Craig Wright. A letter, complete with the SGI letterhead and the signature of SGI APAC service director Greg McKeon had the computing firm contend that it was assisting Cloudcroft Supercomputers Australia and its founder & CEO Craig Wright in developing "hyper-density machines and supercomputers." The letter also claimed a previous endeavor between SGI and....
DeMorgan Ltd., a Sydney, Australia-based company focused on alternative currency and next generation banking, will offer a free, five-week webinar course on Australian supercomputers beginning June 17. The course will be offered in conjunction with IT Masters and Charles Sturt University in Australia. DeMorgan Ltd. has completed several bitcoin-based research projects. The course has been designed for experienced C programmers interested in learning how to program and maintain supercomputers. Students are expected to be familiar with C programming language and Linux. They will also need a....
In this, the first of a three-part series, Danny Bradbury explores the impact the bitcoin network is having on the environment. Just how much carbon dioxide do we produce when we mine a bitcoin? It's becoming an increasingly important question. After all, it's great to disrupt an inefficient and sometimes corrupt incumbent economic system, but most of us would rather not do it at the expense of the planet. The bitcoin network is stuck in a circle that drives up its power usage. People tend to put more computing power on the network so that they can make more more bitcoins. The software....