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As our colleagues Sam Nguyen and Peter Ha decompress after Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco, we note an interesting coincidence in the computing world. No doubt techies already know this, but two important things happened this week. First, Apple announced Snow Leopard, the next iteration of OS X. Second, IBM’s Roadrunner hardware broke the petaflop barrier. A petaflop is 10¹⁵ floating point operations per second – supercomputing’s equivalent of the four-minute mile. Roadrunner succeeded in processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second, which is…amazing.

Here’s where the two are linked:

As Apple’s update to OS X, Snow Leopard will introduce no new user features. That’s right. There will be no new shiny things for fans and critics to rave or rant about. What Snow Leopard will do is pave the way for the next generation of computers. Snow Leopard focuses on making multiple processors work together. That means the Intel dual processor you paid for will actually work at the speed it’s designed for. Thus your Mac will run faster and more efficiently.

Supercomputers have employed multiple processors for years. The greatest challenge isn’t building better hardware, but using the hardware to its full potential. The recent breakthrough by Roadrunner was due largely to its programmers keeping its 116,640 processor cores occupied all the time.

In the consumer market, computer manufacturers struggle with keeping 4 or 8 cores occupied. It’s a software thing – one that Apple has vowed to fix with Snow Leopard. The new OS will allow computers with multiple processors to use their cores in sync, as intended. Some have called this idea the “Holy Grail of software programming.” What it boils down to is changing the software to realize the hardware’s full potential. Transforming, if you will, the mind in order to get maximum performance out of the body.

Hmm… Is it just me or does it seem like there might be some spiritual metaphor in all that?