Supercomputer breaks speed record

[zippyjuan]

Supercomputer breaks speed record

By Jo Twist
BBC News technology and science reporter



Blue Gene could snatch the crown from Japan
The US is poised to push Japan off the top of the supercomputing chart with IBM's prototype Blue Gene/L machine.
It is being assembled for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, a US Department of Energy lab (DOE).

DOE test results show that Blue Gene/L has managed speeds of 70.72 teraflops. The current top machine, Japan's NEC Earth Simulator, clocks up 35.86.

Due next week, the Top 500 list officially charts the fastest computers in the world.

It is announced every six months and is worked out using an officially recognised mathematical speed test called Linpack which measures calculations per second.

The speeds will most likely make it the fastest computer system on the planet, yet the chip technology powering the machine is the kind which can be found in familiar devices like games consoles.

The rest of the article here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3983131.stm

[bachviet]

Double the speed of the current top machine.

[Hoser]

The speed at which computer technology is progressing is incredible. From the article:

Compared to the current fastest supercomputers, Blue Gene is designed to consume one 15th the power and 10 times more compact.

Its peak performance is expected to be 360 teraflops, and will fit into 64 full racks.
IBM's senior vice president of technology and manufacturing, Nick Donofrio, believes that by 2006, Blue Gene will be capable of petaflop computing.

This means it would be capable of doing 1,000 trillion operations a second.

Since the first supercomputer, the Cray-1, was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976, computational speed has leaped 500,000 times.

The Cray-1 was capable of 80 megaflops (80 million operations a second). The Blue Gene/L machine that will be completed next year will be five million times faster.