am i reading this correctly

[jhansen858]

it seems that bitcoin network is far more powerful then all the top 500 supercomputers combined...

http://www.top500.org/list/2010/11/100
about 5,500

vs

Network Hashrate TeraFLOP/s    53,763
http://bitcoinwatch.com/

Thought that was interesting to put it in perspective.

[unk]

this statistic is spouted a lot, but it's a misleading perspective. if we're willing to call all distributed systems 'supercomputers', many such supercomputers around the world use many more cycles than bitcoin mining. for example, many massively multiplayer graphical games would qualify (in exactly the way bitcoin does - via gpus), as would likely the domain name system, sendmail, the bgp, and so on.

[BombaUcigasa]

This is correct. In terms of bitcoin mining or other similar hashing performance, the bitcoin network is more powerful than the top 500 computers designed to be the most powerful computers in the world.

[giszmo]

urgs ... according to my estimations, the top 20-50 would be able to hash faster than the bitcoin network but i only looked at #1's and at #22's hardware specs with rough estimates based on the limited infos they put online.

[myrkul]

This is a misleading perspective as well. Computers playing MMOs are independent from each other in the sense that they are not all working on the same problem.

Not quite true, either. Every miner is working on a slightly different problem.

Compare to seti or folding @home.

[myrkul]

Not quite true, either. Every miner is working on a slightly different problem.

By problem I meant the next block. Not the same shares...

Much like SETI@home are all searching for radio signals, and Folding@home are all searching for the cure for cancer. They're all working on different pieces of the puzzle. Their puzzles are just much much harder.

[DamienBlack]

All of the super computers on that list are multicore, so they also have to work in parallel. So in the end, they too are just networks working on slightly different problems.

[myrkul]

If you took a screencap of every single WoW player, right now, you could build a pretty accurate model of Azeroth.

[myrkul]

Actually, I'd put it more like WoW, and Bitcoin are both like (and significantly more powerful than) a supercomputer.

[kokojie]

I think it's because all these super computers with thousands of GPUs are all using NVIDIA GPUs, if they had used AMD/ATI GPUs, they'd probably easily beat the bitcoin network's computing power.

[Synaptic]

I think it's because all these super computers with thousands of GPUs are all using NVIDIA GPUs, if they had used AMD/ATI GPUs, they'd probably easily beat the bitcoin network's computing power.

...for a very specific use case, of course.