Apparently in an attempt to find the answer to life, the universe and everything, Cray super computers is developing their latest PetaFlop super computer. The computer named "Baker" (apparently HAL was taken) will sport 24,000 quad-core Opterons running at 2.6GHz. How much RAM you ask? Get this, some where in the range of 187TB to 400TB and it makes due with a miserly 11 petabytes of hard disk space.

The system will require 187 cabinets to store all this hardware. All this and I wonder if it uses on-board graphics. I could have saved them the trouble as the obvious answer to the question of life, the universe and everything is 42. Though perhaps it could be used to figure out the average ground speed of a laden swallow, either African or European. Plus, I hear all that RAM makes Battlefield 2 run like a different game.

Story and image via Gizmodo