First, there were the Seven Wonders of the World. Then there was a New Seven Wonders list, voted on Internet-style.
That got us thinking: What are the seven wonders of the IT world? Here's a look at seven of the biggest, most extreme and most unusual computers and projects.
One Example:
The BlueGene/L supercomputer at home at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Home base: This 2,500-square-foot marvel lives at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif.
Claim to fame: Helps researchers answer physics questions about stockpiled nuclear weapons and materials like Plutonium.
Power requirements: 1.5 megawatts (equivalent to a 2,000-horsepower diesel engine).
Clocked speed: Rated fastest in the world after clocking sustained performance of 280.6 trillion operations per second, or teraflops.
Approximate cost: As part of a larger contract including other supercomputers, just under $100 million.
Measure of compute capability: To match the power of this behemoth, every man, woman and child on Earth would need to perform 60,000 calculations per second (without transposing digits or forgetting to "carry the one").
Brawny bandwidth: Its internal communication network would support 150 simultaneous phone conversations for every person in the United States.
Waiting in the wings: IBM has announced a successor, Blue Gene/P, designed to deliver three times the processing power of the Blue Gene/L.
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