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Fastest supercomputer gets faster


Talon

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Fastest supercomputer gets faster

Blue Gene/L, the fastest supercomputer in the world, has broken its own speed record, reaching 135.5 teraflops - a trillion calculations a second.

That is double the speed it clocked up to take it to the number one spot in the Top 500 supercomputer league.

The IBM Blue Gene machine that achieved the new mark is being assembled for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a US Department of Energy (DOE) lab.

It did 70.72 teraflops last year to beat Japan's NEC Earth Simulator.

The Blue Gene/L is due to be completed for the Livermore labs in 2005.

Its peak theoretical performance is expected to be 360 teraflops, with the machine taking up 64 full racks.

Blue Gene's new record was achieved by doubling the number of current racks to 32. Each rack holds 1,024 processors, yet the chips are the same as those found in high-end computers on the High Street.

The processors are special dual-processing engines, known as cores.

The final machine will help scientists work out the safety, security and reliability requirements for the US's nuclear weapons stockpile, without the need for underground nuclear testing.

Everyday problems

Supercomputing has been used in the past to work out highly complex scientific problems, such as understanding the structure of proteins to eventually improve drugs.

They are also crucial in climate research and in prediction models for natural events, such as tsunamis.

But they are now being used to solve everyday problems, too, such as airport ground traffic.

Supercomputing power can also be rented, in some cases, to help out in design or other problem-solving tasks that need tremendous processing power.

IBM recently set up a new unit to start getting its supercomputing power more involved in solving business problems.

The computers that generated Lord of the Rings characters and places - Gollum, the Balrog, and Middle Earth - are now available for hire, for example. The cluster of 1,008 computers in New Zealand can be rented on-demand, on a per hour, per processor basis.

Already the supercomputer is being used to design a super yacht and test gene sequencing algorithms.

Since the original supercomputer, the Cray-1, was set up at Los Alamos National Laboratory, US, in 1976, computational speed has jumped by 500,000 times.

The Cray-1 was able to do 80 megaflops (80 million operations a second).

Story from BBC NEWS:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/technology/4379261.stm

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People never cease to amaze me.

Id post more comments about it but im too busy laughing at the words "teraflops" and "megaflops".

PS: [G]™, you dont need to type in caps all the time..most people would consider it yelling and yelling gives me a head ache. sad.gif

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dear god i can imagine having a computer like that.

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Wow, I can just see it now. ::gazes off into space as eyes glaze over::

The things that I could do with a computer that fast are endless! Oh, if only I owned the world...I could probably own that computer.

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funny how the story specifically mentions how these computers are great tools to help warn about tsunamis

and yet.........

well, you know the rest of the story

guess that computer has it's foot in it's mouth thumbsup.gif

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Id post more comments about it but im too busy laughing at the words "teraflops" and "megaflops".

542473[/snapback]

rofl

That sounds amazing! I wish that I could even see it, let alone have one...

That would be so awesome if I could get it... devil.gifgrin2.gif

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Even with all that Processing power i bet it still crashes from time to time thumbsup.gif Would be cool to see it though!! Wonder how many Home PC's it would take to get as much power as Blue Gene??

What an age we live in wink2.gif

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And to think computers are only going to continue to get faster and faster for years and years to come!

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dont worry, u will have 2 wait another 20 yrs for computers to get that fast crying.gifw00t.gifno.gif

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by sometime early 2020 you will be able to buy a PC that is equiv to the power of the human brain for $2000 by 2030 a Computer that is more powerful than a whole village of people.

by 2099 1 cent of computer power will be more powerful than every human brain on earth.

Computers are always getting faster, evoling 10 million times faster than humans are. Humans brain do not gain hardly any speed over years or capacity. Computers will leave us behind.

Edited by whoa182
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That's insanse

What do they use it for?

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