IBM Supercomputer Again Claims Record (nearly doubles its record set few months earlier )

Bigcharts.marketwatch ^ | THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 04, 2004 9:36 PM | AP Online

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

SAN JOSE, Calif., Nov 04, 2004 (AP Online via COMTEX) -- A $100 million supercomputer being built to analyze the nation's nuclear stockpile has again set an unofficial performance record - the second in just over a month.

IBM Corp.'s still-incomplete Blue Gene/L system, which will be installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, achieved a sustained performance of 70.72 trillion calculations per second using a standard test program, the Department of Energy said Thursday.

The world's current official leader, Japan's Earth Simulator, can sustain 35.86 trillion calculations per second using the same software.

The announcement is the latest in a series of claims leading up to next Tuesday's unveiling in Pittsburgh of the official list of the world's top computers.

Since 2002, much to the chagrin of some U.S. technology companies, the Japanese system has topped the list, which is maintained by several university computer scientists who run the Top500 project.

In September, IBM announced that the Blue Gene/L prototype had sustained speeds of 36 trillion calculations per second. Last week, NASA announced that a system built by Silicon Graphics Inc. had topped that by sustaining 42 trillion calculations per second.

Both Blue Gene and the NASA computers are still unfinished, and the performance of both is expected to improve as more microprocessors are added.

Blue Gene, for instance, is just a quarter of its final planned size. When finished, it will exceed Earth Simulator's performance by a factor of nine but require just a fraction of the electricity used by the Japanese machine.

According to the Energy Department, the computer will be used to better understand pressing scientific issues, including how nuclear weapons age.

The new supercomputer "will reduce the time-to-solution for many computational problems, allowing DOE scientists to explorer larger, longer and more complex problems than ever before," Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said in a statement.

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On the Net:

Top 500 supercomputers: http://www.top500.org

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Way to go Big Blue.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Previous article:

I.B.M. Supercomputer Sets World Record for Speed

[Tai_Chung]

7 billion calculations per penny. What a bargain!

[softengine]

Blue bump!

[ThePythonicCow]

Last week, NASA announced that a system built by Silicon Graphics Inc. had topped that by sustaining 42 trillion calculations per second.

Well that record didn't last long. I was one of the ones who built this Silicon Graphics system. Good thing we already had our party.

Now back to work ... that 70 trillion is going to take a little more work to beat.

[ThePythonicCow]

Both Blue Gene and the NASA computers are still unfinished

But the NASA computer from Silicon Graphics is a bought and paid for production system, installed on the customers premises, running their work.

I hear tell the IBM Blue Gene system is still physically located in some IBM lab somewhere.

[ThePythonicCow]

Huh - my American calculator says 7 thousand calculations per penny, not 7 billion. This is US, not UK - trillion is 10 to the 12, not 10 to the 18.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Here are some pictures of developers and the actual portions of the machine.

Blue Gene/L prototype