Wednesday, February 28th 2007
IBM Planning New Supercomputer
Computing giant IBM is planning yet another supercomputer, with this one set to take the performance crown away from its very own BlueGene. The computer is being built for the Department of Energy and will be housed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, costing $110 million to construct. Named Roadrunner, this new hybrid will use a unique design combining 16,000 conventional AMD Opteron Cores alongside 16,000 Cell processors (yes, the ones in the PS3), with calculations being shared between the two. According to IBM, the Cell processors will act as the workhorse, completing the major floating point calculations, whilst the Opterons will act as the system interface processors and the transactional backbones between the nodes. Once the machine is finished it ought to run at one petaflop - that's one trillion calculations each second, more than capable of belittling BlueGene, which is capable of a mere 280 teraflops.
Source:
DailyTech
18 Comments on IBM Planning New Supercomputer
Look at the things DOE does. You will see the many ways they can use this computer. There will be a waiting list a year or more long just to get a small bit of access time.
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/edinburgh_and_east/6384481.stm
This was announced in the uk last week, got me thinking about the thread I started with some audio of a definition of a quantum computer, now thats what im waiting for :)
forums.techpowerup.com/showthread.php?t=25958&highlight=quantum+computing
It's designed for multiple INDEPENDENT maths calculation thread... not unlike Google is designed for multiple independent database searches.
That link to news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/edinburgh_and_east/6384481.stm is interesting.
My thoughts:
1./ What a complete waste of taxpayers money!!!!
2./ They are replacing a super computer with another one ONLY 3x more powerful
3./ But, according to Moore's Law, if power triples every two years, (or doubles every 18 months), then they are replacing a machine with another one that is only 2 years more advanced
4./ And then they want to make it last until 2014
5./ But in 2014, a supercomputer for the same price will be about 30x more powerful
This sounds like political/economic vested interests.
The whole deal needs investigating/audit.
www.legionhardware.com/document.php?id=618&p=3
F.E.A.R. is a game not limited by the CPU. I mean maybe you're interested if you're not just saying useless stuff like WarEagle to raise your Posts/day. :)
brute force attack *drools*
superpi 32m time=.2 seconds