91.4 Tesla and 8.126 petaflops

There must be something in the air in Germany. The last two weeks have seen some big numbers in science and engineering. In Dresden the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf has set a new world record for magnetic fields with 91.4 Tesla. The team at the High Magnetic Field Laboratory Dresden (HLD) made a coil weighing about 200 kilograms in which an electric current can create the giant magnetic field for a period of a few milliseconds. The coil survives the short period and intense Lorentz forces, through being made of a cooper alloy and being held in place using a plastic fibre corset. Whilst 500km up the road in Hamburg, a Japanese supercomputer was becoming the fastest in the world. The K Computer achieved a mere 8.162 quadrillion calculations per second, or 8.162 petaflops (ten to the power fifteen, flops = floating point operations per second). But can it cope with Windows and IE9?