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China has taken the lead in the supercomputer (the fastest computers on the planet) race, having built a 155 ton system using 7,168 GPUs (Graphic Processing Units, from high end graphic cards) and 14,336 CPUs to achieve peak performance of 2.507 petaflops (a petaflop is one million billion floating point operations per second, otherwise known as FLOPS). Sustained speed is 563 teraflops (one thousand billion). The Chinese Tianhe-1A supercomputer cost $88 million, requires 4.04 magawatts of power and occupies 1,000 square meters (10,764 square feet). Given that China manufactures a growing share of electronic items, and Chinese students have long...

Exclusive IBM looks set to join the seriously multi-core set with the Power7 chip. Internal documents seen by The Register show Power7 with eight cores per processor and also some very, very large IBM boxes based on the chip. The IBM documents have the eight-core Power7 being arranged in dual-chip modules. So, that's 16-cores per module. As IBM tells it, each core will show 32 gigaflops of performance, bringing each chip to 256 gigaflops. Just on the gigaflop basis, that makes Power7 twice as fast per core as today's dual-core Power6 chips, although the actual clock rate on the Power7...

This news came out a week ago (edit: IBM’s press release came out this afternoon) but I didn’t have anything to add so I didn’t post it. I decided this morning that it was interesting and ought to get a mention just for the news.****************************Specifically, a supercomputing machine—dubbed “Roadrunner” and set to be fully installed by 2008 at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory—will run on some 16,000 Cell Broadband Engine processors and a similar number of AMD Opteron processors. The Cell chip was originally built for Sony’s Playstation 3 console, which has been delayed until November...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- IBM will build a next-generation supercomputer for the U.S. Energy Department with the potential to achieve a sustained speed of 1,000 trillion calculations per second, or one petaflop, the department said on Wednesday. The new computer, dubbed "Roadrunner", will be built at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Congress provided $35 million in fiscal 2006, which ends on September 30, to launch the computer project. Roadrunner may eventually be used for an Energy Department program that ensures the U.S. stockpile of nuclear weapons is safe and reliable without the resumption of underground testing, the department...