There is a list of the world’s 500 most powerful supercomputers, and the last time it was updated, back in June this year, Fujitsu’s “K” (pictured) came out on top, taking the No. 1 spot from Tianhe-1A (a supercomputer from China).
It was the first time since 2004 for Japan to get to claim those bragging rights, and now the country’s largest business newspaper The Nikkei reports that the… → Read More
The International Supercomputing Conference is taking place in Hamburg/Germany at the moment – reason enough for the Top500 committee to update their list of the world’s 500 most powerful supercomputers today. And it turns out that Japan, via Fujitsu’s so-called “K”, is the new No. 1 on that list. → Read More
A mainframe in China running a number of NVIDIA GPUs in parallel just hit 2.5 petaflops, a number that places it in the number one slot in the list of the world’s top 500 supercomputers. The Chinese machine, called Tianhe-1A, looks like it will be the fastest supercomputer for at least six months and experts are suggesting that we could see the waning of the great American supercomputing empire. → Read More
Today, IBM delivered its first Aquasar supercomputer, which is cooled by water, to a Swiss technology institute. The system needs 40% less energy to run than air-cooled machines, and the waste heat it produces can be used to warm buildings.
The system works thanks to micro-channel liquid coolers that are attached directly to processors, one of the biggest culprits of computer heat generation. → Read More
SGI has been quiet as of late, in fact we haven’t heard much since they declared bankruptcy and were bought by Rackable systems back in April. Apparently since then they’ve been waiting for the dust to settle and release a new workstation, the Octane III supercomputer. → Read More
NEC today announced that their renewed Earth Simulator System, Japan’s most famous supercomputer, now achieves a peak performance of 131 TFLOPS (131 trillion calculations per second. This is up from the 35 TFLOPS that made the same system the world’s fastet computer back in 2002. → Read More
NEC announced yesterday that its SX-9 supercomputer has achieved the world’s fastest standing in the high performance computing (HPC) field [JP] by getting top scores in 19 of 28 sections in the HPC Challenge Benchmark test. The HPC Benchmark is generally accepted as a method of measuring and ranking the world’s supercomputers and consists of seven different tests encompassing 28… → Read More
Yesterday we noted a test where a stripped-down Cell processor beat the pants off an Intel Core2 Quadro at an h264 transcoding task. Well, now that doesn’t seem so surprising, as the Roadrunner supercomputer built by IBM primarily with Cell processors is now calculating at the rate of one petaflop. That’s a quadrillion operations per second. I never thought I’d see the number… → Read More
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