Top 10 Supercomputers. Like this story?
Get the latest data center news by e-mail or RSS, or follow us on Twitter or Facebook. The twice-a-year list of the Top 500 supercomputers documents the most powerful systems on the planet. Many of these supercomputers are striking not just for their processing power, but for their design and appearance as well. Art PC. World's Smallest Hard Drive Built of Atoms. Just 96 atoms make up one byte of magnetic storage space. - Scientists have built a magnetic storage device made of 96 atoms. - The advance could lead to tiny hard drives able to store 200 to 300 times more information than they can today.
Hard drives could one day be the size of rice grains, powering music players so small they would fit inside your ear. Scientists at IBM and the German Center for Free-Electron Laser Science have built the world's smallest unit of magnetic storage, using just 96 atoms to create one byte of data. Conventional drives require a half a billion atoms for each byte.