Posted on 10/29/2005 9:58:37 PM PDT by nickcarraway
The Blue Gene/L supercomputer has broken its own record to achieve more than double the number of calculations it can do a second.
It reached 280.6 teraflops - that is 280.6 trillion calculations a second.
The IBM machine, at the US Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, officially became the most powerful computer on the planet in June.
The fastest supercomputers in the world are ranked by experts every six months in the Top 500 list.
Blue Gene's performance, while it has been under construction, has quadrupled in just 12 months.
Each person in the world with a handheld calculator would still take decades to do the same calculations Blue Gene is now able to do every second.
Linton F Brooks from the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) formally unveiled it at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on Friday. The completed Blue Gene/L joins another supercomputing team-mate, called ASC Purple, to get to work on safeguarding the US's nuclear stockpile.
Purple can do 100 teraflops while it carries out simulations of nuclear weapons performance.
"The unprecedented computing power of these two supercomputers is more critical than ever to meet the time-urgent issues related to maintaining our nation's ageing nuclear stockpile without testing," said Mr Brooks.
"BlueGene/L points the way to the future and the computing power we will need to improve our ability to predict the behaviour of the stockpile as it continues to age."
Power players
The machines are part of a decade-long project to develop the fastest computers in the world.
Blue Gene will work on materials ageing calculations, molecular dynamics, material modelling as well as turbulence and instability in hydrodynamics.
Purple will then use that information to run 3D weapons codes needed to simulate nuclear weapons performance quickly.
That analysis had previously taken place in underground nuclear tests.
Their massive brains will be able to perform half a petaflop together - that is half a quadrillion (1,000,000,000,000,000) calculations a second.
In a recent demonstration, Blue Gene/L achieved another first by running a materials science application at 101.5 teraflops, sustained over seven hours on the machine's 131,072 processors.
Supercomputers are playing an increasingly crucial role in working out complex problems quickly.
They recently became a major tool in a range of advanced biological applications, from helping to piece together fragmented DNA information to the design of new drug molecules.
Astronomers have also borrowed their brains to re-create how the Universe evolved into the shape it is today.
Their massive simulation and processing power have also been used improve the accuracy of weather forecasts, help design better cars, and improve disease diagnosis.
Bill Clinton has it on EBAY and it has been there (under Arlington Burial Plots) for best part of a week.
I don't read Chinese but I believe it is there as well (under Presidential Library)
TT
Though the greatest computer is the universe itself.... Incomprehensible information, and not a simulation!
Some aren't so sure...
Id have one of these if it were not for the permitting process for the power plant to run the damn thing... :)
I find it difficult to believe they think they can get away with not testing anything. Maybe testing less, but nothing?
Estimates for the computational power of the human brain are around 10,000 trillion operations per second, give or take an order of magnitude. The next few decades will be interesting.
I have to agree with the sentiment. Some physical theories predict there are really 11-dimensions.
Imagine being stuck in only 2-D, and thinking that a cylinder is really a rectangle (or a circle, viewed from above). There's so much we're not seeing, I'm perfectly open to that kind of speculation.
I do believe in ghosts, for example!
I'm sure it doesn't use Windows XP.
Sooner or later we're going to have two choices regarding our nuclear weapons. Either we're going to have to resume nuclear testing or we're going to have to adopt the Russian approach. While we just do maintenance on our weapons, the Russians have a set "shelf life" for their weapons. After that time passes, the weapon is dismantled, and remanufactured so it is as good as new.
WordStar really flies on this machine!
It's still a dinosaur compared to the mind of God.
Just an overpowered porn downloader.
Yeah, higher dimensions are fun. Check out Flatland if you haven't read it.
But can it run Windows XP?
I believe it's a Beowulf cluster running Linux. Not even the U.S. government is stupid enough to try to do the serious work of modelling nuclear explosions on anything from microsoft.
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