Posted on 10/27/2004 2:02:08 PM PDT by ShadowAce
MOFFETT FIELD, Calif.--Even as Silicon Graphics Inc. trumpeted on Tuesday a new speed record with the Columbia supercomputer it built for NASA, CNET News.com has learned, it quietly submitted another, faster result: 51.9 trillion calculations per second.
During the unveiling of the Columbia supercomputer, SGI touted a speed of 42.7 trillion calculations per second, or 42.7 teraflops. That handily beat the machine at the top of a list of the world's 500 fastest machines, NEC's Earth Simulator at 35.9 teraflops, as well as a top challenger, IBM's Blue Gene/L at 36.0 teraflops.
The 42.7 teraflops speed used only 16 of Columbia's 20 servers. That means that 2,048 of the 10,240 Itanium processors in the supercomputer weren't being used--and the unused chips are the newest generation of Itaniums, each with 9MB of high-speed cache memory, SGI Chief Executive Bob Bishop said.
SGI clocked the full 20-server system at a sustained speed of 51.9 teraflops, according to a source familiar with the test. On a secondary but still scrutinized measurement, peak speed, Columbia ran at 61.0 teraflops, a smidgen ahead of the 60-teraflop speed Intel President Paul Otellini predicted in September.
Full results in the closely watched competition are released every June and November at supercomputing conferences; the newest Top500 list will be released Nov. 8, organizer Jack Dongarra said. Despite the interest in the list, its organizers and others recognize that the speed test, called Linpack, is a convenient but incomplete performance measurement.
SGI's higher speed gives the Mountain View, Calif., company more of a lead over IBM, but Big Blue's score was performed Sept. 16, leaving plenty of time for upgrades and new speed tests.
SGI declined to confirm or deny the statistics, and Dongarra declined to comment.
Tech Ping
MOFFETT FIELD, Calif.--Even as Silicon Graphics Inc. trumpeted on Tuesday a new speed record with the Columbia supercomputer it built for NASA, CNET News.com has learned, it quietly submitted another, faster result: 51.9 trillion calculations per second.
Ok fine but can it stop those damn popups?
I want one
Now that's a serious gaming rig.
Yes, but will it run EQ2 at full resolution during a raid??? NO???? ARRRRGGGGGGHHH!!!!!
Faster even than my iMac G5?
What happened to the computer Virginia Tech made by linking all the gazillion Macs together?
Etch-a-Sketch SGI is still in business?
Sorta like drag racing for nerds, huh?
51.9 trillion calculations per second.
===
Kinda sorta reminds me of te national debt !!! ;-))
I bet solitare really moves.
How quick can you patch it?
What's the deal with Itanium? I remember when it was the next great thing and now it's under the radar.
No - I won't play another SOE game - I quit EQ about 3 years ago (more). I just read the beta reports and smile. You'll see me in WoW, probably.
> That means that 2,048 of the 10,240 Itanium processors
> in the supercomputer ...
10248 Itanics?
That must be half of this year's production of those chips.
"Yea, but can it run Linux?"(c)Slashdot
It's being updated by replacing the standard G5 Mac towers with new faster G5 Mac servers. Smaller and faster. Preliminary data is that it is 20 % faster than before.
Uunnnghh
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