Small and Powerful

If you could hold the power and speed of a supercomputer in your hands, would you? Jack Dongarra, Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and the director of the Innovative Computing Laboratory, has discovered that you already can, kind of: Apple’s new iPad 2 would match a four-processor version of the Cray 2 supercomputer, the world’s fastest computer with eight processors in 1985. Using the LINPACK Benchmark, which measures a computer’s mathematical computing power—reported in millions of floating point operations per second (MFLOPS)—in solving a dense system of linear equations, Dongarra and other researchers have also discerned that the new iPad2 is about 10 times as fast as its predecessor, the original iPad.