[extropy-chat] 70 teraflops

[BillK]

On Fri, 05 Nov 2004 16:07:14 -0600, Damien Broderick wrote:
> 
> Blue Gene pulls ahead in supercomputer race
> 
> Energy Department officials said Nov. 4 that the agency's Blue Gene/L
> machine developed by IBM Corp. has hit processing speeds of 70.72 teraflops
> using the Linpack industry benchmark. That's almost double the speed Blue
> Gene achieved in late September, when the supercomputer broke the
> 2-year-old record held by NEC Computer Inc.'s Earth Simulator.
> 

And by next year -
"Blue Gene L, which will deliver between 180 teraflops and 360
teraflops, will cost between $50 million and $100 million to complete,
or about $200,000 per teraflop, Seager said."


Perhaps more significant is the MareNostrum blade server.
<http://www.computerworld.com/hardwaretopics/hardware/story/0,10801,97275,00.html>

"Dubbed MareNostrum, the supercomputer employs a cluster of 2,520
eServer BladeCenter JS20 systems running the Linux operating system.
IBM expects it to be the first supercomputer to attain a top 10
ranking using blade server technology.
IBM expects the computer's peak performance to reach 40TFLOPS
(trillion floating-point operations per second). At its current
configuration, the computer already reached a sustained performance of
20.53TFLOPS, with peak performance of 31.36TFLOPS, IBM said."

This machine uses blade servers which can be assembled at a fraction
of the cost of the specialized processors of Blue Gene. More like
supercomputing for the man in the street.

BillK