Just wanted to share an amazing fact with you guys I just learned today the fastest supercomputer in the world is the Tianhe-2 in Guangzhou, China, and has a maximum processing speed of 54.902 petaFLOPS. A petaFLOP is a quadrillion (one thousand trillion) floating point calculations per second. That’s a huge amount of calculations, and yet, that doesn’t even come close to the processing speed of the human brain. In contrast, our miraculous brains operate on the next order higher. Although it is impossible to precisely calculate, it is postulated that the human brain operates at 1 exaFLOP, which is equivalent to a billion billion calculations per second. In 2014, some clever researchers in Japan tried to match the processing power in one second from one percent of the brain. That doesn’t sound like very much, and yet it took the 4th fastest supercomputer in the world (the K Computer) 40 minutes to crunch the calculations for a single second of brain activity!
