Computer sets world speed record

[Knight-Dragon]

http://straitstimes.asia1.com/techscience/story/0,4386,275547,00.html?

AN IBM machine has reclaimed the title of world's fastest supercomputer, overtaking a Japanese model which caused shock waves within United States government agencies when it set a computing speed record in 2002.

Supercomputing technologies were widely viewed as indicators of national industrial prowess in the 1980s and 1990s. They are used extensively in weapons design.

More recently, federal officials have become concerned that lagging investment in high-performance computing could leave the US vulnerable to competition in industries ranging from biotechnology to materials science.

The IBM computer is based on a computing technology, called Blue Gene/L, which takes an approach radically different from that used by the Japanese supercomputer, called the Earth Simulator.

The Japanese machine, which was built to analyse climate change patterns, uses fewer processors than the IBM machine, but they are specialised and faster.

The IBM supercomputer has surpassed the Earth Simulator, built by the NEC Corporation, in running the Linpack benchmark, a test program which solves a dense system of mathematical equations. IBM announced on Tuesday that the Blue Gene/L system had attained a sustained performance of 36.01 trillion calculations a second, or teraflops, eclipsing the top mark of 35.86 teraflops reached in 2002 by the Earth Simulator in Yokohama. The new speed was reached during internal testing at IBM's production centre in Rochester, Minnesota.

'This is notable because of the fixation everyone has had on the Earth Simulator,' said Mr Dave Turek, IBM's vice-president for the high-performance computing division.

The new system is notable because it packs its computing power much more densely than other large-scale computing systems. Blue Gene/L is a 100th the physical size of the Earth Simulator and consumes a 28th of the power per computation, the company said.

The Blue Gene/L will have wide commercial applications, first in the petroleum and biotechnology industries, Mr Turek said.

A large-capacity version of the Blue Gene/L system is scheduled to be installed early next year at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California. That machine will have about 130,000 processors, compared to the 16,000-processor prototype that set the speed record.

Computer scientists said that increases in speed like that provided by the Blue Gene/L would probably have a significant impact on science.

'It's again an exciting time to be involved in high-performance computing,' said Professor Jack Dongarra, a computer scientist at the University of Tennessee who tracks the 500 fastest computers in a biannual ranking. 'For some computational scientists, it's like a Hubble telescope.' -- New York Times

 

[IglooDame]

Man, I bet that machine would be able to handle a Huge map max#AI Civ3 game with no problem or mid-turn pause at all.

 

[DreadCthulhu]

Now just imagine a Beowulf cluster of those machines!

 

[Aphex_Twin]

I can only shudder at what the capacity of Blue Gene would be if it would be the same size as Earth Sim

Can someone estimate how many frames per second would such a beast generate when running say Doom III?

 

[Fetus4188]

A large-capacity version of the Blue Gene/L system is scheduled to be installed early next year at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California. That machine will have about 130,000 processors, compared to the 16,000-processor prototype that set the speed record.

Sweet! That's where I live, maybe I can see this thing in action

 

[stormbind]

I can only shudder at what the capacity of Blue Gene would be if it would be the same size as Earth Sim

Can someone estimate how many frames per second would such a beast generate when running say Doom III?

Not many, because it has a rubbish graphics card, and the game isn't optimised for processors running in parallel. Also, I don't know what operating system they use, but it's probably not Windows XP

 

[Zeekater]

It probably takes quite some fans to keep that baby cool

 

[Knight-Dragon]

http://sg.news.yahoo.com/041020/1/3nw59.html

NEC launches world's fastest supercomputer

Japanese electronics giant NEC Corp, said it has begun selling the world's fastest supercomputer.

NEC claimed its SX-8 is the most powerful 'vector-type' supercomputer, with a sustainable data processing speed well beyond IBM's recently unveiled Blue Gene/L supercomputer.

In September IBM said its Blue Gene/L supercomputer had surpassed NEC's Earth Simulator to become the world's most powerful supercomputer.

IBM's Blue Gene/L is capable of a sustained data processing speed of 36.01 teraflops, or one trillion floating point operations per second.

NEC said its newest SX series model has a peak processing speed of 65 teraflops and a sustainable performance of roughly 90 percent that speed or 58.5 teraflops.

The NEC and IBM supercomputers are different in structure. NEC says its SX-8, because of its vector architecture, "delivers much higher sustained performance than scalar supercomputers" like IBM's Blue Gene/L.

"We have received 100 orders so far," with the first models to be shipped to the UK's national weather forecasting service and the High Performance Computing Center in Stuttgart, Germany, said NEC managing director Tadao Kondo.

The Tokyo-based electronics maker aims to sell or rent 700 models in the first three years.

The monthly rental fee for the SX-8 is a minimum 1.17 million yen (10,730 dollars) and the purchase price is 130 million yen.

Supercomputers are widely used to develop complex products like new airplanes, automobiles and drugs.

 

[Pirate]

When they say these two are different architecture (vector vs. scalar) are there any real differences in the types of applications they are best suited for? I mean can both test airplane designs equally as well? Or does one have a distinct advantage over the other, other than sheer speed?