Google Book Search is launched and the Kraken breaks the Petascale Barrier. All on today’s On This Day from TEST Huddle.
2004 – Google Book Search
On this day in 2004, Google launches Google Book Search, a service that searches the full text of books . The search is possible as Google has commenced scaning as many books as possible. Google converts the scans to text using optical character recognition, and stores the results in its digital database.
2009 – The Petascale Barrier is broken
A supercomputer at The University of Tennessee, (named Kraken) becomes the world’s first academic supercomputer to break the petascale barrier, performing more than one thousand trillion operations per second. The machine (Cray XT5) is composed of nearly one hundred thousand computing cores. It features 129 terabytes of memory and can store the equivalent of over ten million phonebooks.
Images: Wikipedia
