Seven interesting computer facts

Here are seven “did you know” interesting computer facts (info consolidated from the CIO website):

1. What’s the closest computer to the North Pole?

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory Webcam #1, A NetCam XL, made by StarDot Technologies.

2. What’s the farthest computer from Earth?

NASA’s Voyager satellite computes at the edge of space as we know it, which, BTW, has passed by Jupiter and Saturn – and it’s almost 30 years old.

3. What is the most intriguing data center?

Google, of course.  Located in Dalles, Oregon, on the banks of the Columbia River, 80 miles east of Portland, they house an estimated 500,000 around the world, spread across 25 locations, that stores and estimated 200 petabytes.  Also hydroelectric dam is used to power two four-story cooling towers.   

4. What is the world’s largest scientific grid computing project?

The E-sciencE II (EGEE-II) project, launched on September 2006, for use by scientists around the world, used for large-scale scientific research projects in fields from geology to chemistry.  It processes 98,000 jobs a day, more than 1 million a month, juggling about 30,000 jobs concurrently, on average. 

5. What is the world’s fastest supercomputer?

IBM BlueGene/L (BGL).  It is powered by 65,536 dual-processor computer nodes, and is located on a 2,500-square-foot marvel at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, CA.  It has been rated fastest in the world after clocking a sustained performance of 280.6 trillion operations per second, or teraflops.

6. What is the smallest PC to run Windows Vista?

OQO, Model 02.  A Handheld PC that checks in at 5.6 (wide) by 3.3 (high) by 1 (deep) inches, and weighs just under 1 pound.  It consists of a 1.5GHz processor, Windows XP or Vista, 30 or 60GB hard drive, 512MB or 1GBDDR DRAM, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.  At the moment, it starts at $1,499.

7. What is the biggest paradigm change in Enterprise Software?

Linux Kernel, of course.  Created by Linus Torvalds, in 1991, helped open-source developers collectively craft a viable alternative to Microsoft operating systems.  It is said that the Linux kernel contains 8.2 million lines of code, with approximately 86 lines added every hour.  New releases occur every 2.6 months (unless otherwise marked).