Posted on 11/05/2004 8:02:32 AM PST by canuck_conservative
SAN JOSE, Calif. — 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.
I want one.
I'll bet its just bichin' for running Quake III LAN parties.
Yeah, but they don't mention what kind of video card it has, how do I know how many FPS I'll get with AA enabled? ;)
This would help my Folding@Home production.
I want to overclock it!!!
I want to overclock it!!!
WordStar will really scream on this one.
Awesome! But a little strange as it sounds 'Blue Gene' is being primarily used to study nuclear issues, rather than DNA, RNA, and protein folding.
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.
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Sheeesh... my Dell does 99.99 trillion cps using Windex ZP with SP666, but nobody believes me (except nutcase liberal DemoRATs) !!!
Well, if the "standard" s/w is the Linpack benchmark, it really doesn't measure real world performance, it primarily measures processor speed. The real world performance comes with that, but even moreso, with memory and interprocessor bandwidth. These have never been IBMs strong suits in the past.
They need to stop mucking around with those wimpy PowerPC procs and load that muther with Opterons. It'd SCORCH those records. 9 times? Try 20 times....
Whew...........
When you hit Cntl-Alt-Del, the Earth shakes.
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