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SEATTLE, WA -- (MARKET WIRE) -- 02/15/2006 -- Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. (NASDAQ: CRAY) today announced that the "Red Storm" supercomputer installed at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico is the first computer to surpass the 1 terabyte-per-second (1 TB/sec) performance mark on a widely used test that measures communications among processors in high-performance computing (HPC) systems and provides a key indication of the total communication capacity of the network. Red Storm posted 1.8 TB/sec (1.8 trillion bytes per second) on the PTRANS interconnect bandwidth test that is part of the High Performance Computing Challenge (HPCC) test suite. By...

Tyan and AMD Unleash the Ultimate 8-Way Platform and Server System TAIPEI, TAIWAN, June 1st, 2005 - Eight-way systems are available now, but access to such systems has been limited to the upper echelon of many customer bases, limiting the adoption rate and potential for 8-way processing to truly add value to many organizations. Enter the Tyan Thunder K8QW (S4881): the ultimate in 8-way processing platforms, and its system-level counterpart, the Tyan Transport VX50 (B4881). The design and implementation of the Thunder K8QW (S4881) offers the option to upgrade to four or eight-way processing capabilities. Multiple features are included in...

Supercomputers based on Apple’s Xserve technology landed four spots on the newest TOP500 list. The announcement came during the 20th International Supercomputer Conference, held this week in Heidelberg, Germany. Presented by the Universities of Mannheim and Tennessee and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing (NESRSC) Center, the TOP500 project collects performance benchmarks for the most powerful computing systems on the planet. The TOP500 list is created by comparing the best performance of the “Linpack” benchmark, which tests the system by making it solve a dense system of linear equations. The TOP500 list is generated twice each year. Four Apple-based supercomputers...

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...

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...

OCTOBER 26, 2004 (MACCENTRAL) - Virginia Tech's all-Mac OS X supercomputer at the university's Terascale Computing Facility made headlines last year when it was determined to be the third-fastest supercomputer in the world. System X has been upgraded to Apple Computer Inc.'s Xserve G5 server and now runs even faster, with a sustained speed of 12.25 trillion operations per second -- 19% faster than before. Apple debuted the Power Mac G5 in 2003 -- the first computer from the company to feature a 64-bit PowerPC 970 chip manufactured by IBM Corp. -- and a few customers who placed early orders...

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...

An almost audible sigh of relief arose from Washington last week as Blue Gene/L, a computer built by International Business Machines, claimed the title of the world's fastest supercomputer. Science and technology policymakers have spent the past two years fretting that the US was losing its lead in high-performance computing, with potentially serious implications for national competitiveness. "We believe that to out-compete, we must out-compute," said Deborah Wince-Smith, president of the Council on Competitiveness, one of many lobby groups pressing federal agencies to spend more on supercomputer research. The lobbying campaign was sparked by the success of the Earth...

September 29, 2004 I.B.M. Supercomputer Sets World Record for Speed By JOHN MARKOFF n I.B.M. machine has reclaimed the title of world's fastest supercomputer, overtaking a Japanese computer that had caused shock waves at United States government agencies when it set a computing speed record in 2002.Supercomputing technologies were widely viewed as indicators of national industrial prowess in the 1980's and 1990's. They are used extensively in weapons design. More recently, federal officials have become concerned that lagging investment in high-performance computing could leave the United States vulnerable to competition in industries ranging from biotechnology to materials science. The...

A U.S. Army contractor has purchased a $5.8 million, 1,566-server supercomputer from Apple Computer, a real-world cousin to an academic system that briefly appeared high on a list of the most powerful machines. In November, a machine called System X with 1,100 dual-processor Power Mac G5 workstations climbed to third place on the Top500 list of the most powerful supercomputers. On Monday, Huntsville, Ala.-based Colsa announced it's buying a larger system called MACH 5 to run Army simulations of the aerodynamics of flight much faster than the speed of sound. System X, which vanished from the most recent list for...

Apple Computer Inc. will announce on Monday the sale of 1566 dual processor 1U rack-mount 64-bit Xserve G5 servers to COLSA Corp., which will be used to build what is expected to be one of the fastest supercomputers in the world. The US$5.8 million cluster will be used to model the complex aero-thermodynamics of hypersonic flight for the U.S. Army. "We did about a year and a half of research on a variety of processors before making our decision," Dr Anthony DiRienzo, executive vice president at COLSA Corp., told MacCentral. "We did a best value competition and Apple won that...

Hundreds Meet in San Francisco to Create Instant Supercomputer Apr 3, 2004 By Terence Chea Associated Press Writer SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Hundreds of area technophiles joined laptops Saturday in an attempt to create a computing force on par with the world's most powerful supercomputers. The experiment organized by researchers at the University of San Francisco was designed to determine whether a gymnasium full of off-the-shelf personal computers networked together can muster enough power to process the most complex research problems. Organizers hoped to break into the ranks of the world's top 500 supercomputers through the event, which they called...

Apple To Build A Second Supercomputer At Virginia Tech ROANOKE, Va. (AP)--After building one of the world's fastest supercomputers on its first try, Apple Computer Inc. is again teaming with Virginia Tech to make another high performance machine using its new 64-bit Xserve G5 computer. Xserve, a thinner, more compact machine designed for clustering with other computers, will replace the supercomputer Tech built in November using off-the-shelf G5 PowerMacs. Tech project leader Srinidhi Varadarajan said the university will upgrade from PowerMacs to Xserves in April or May. Tech is still negotiating the price with Apple, though Varadarajan said Monday any...

HOUSTON, NOVEMBER 9 : Virginia Tech’s scientists led by 30-year-old Indian American Assistant Professor Dr Srinidhi Varadarajan have amazed the computing industry by putting together the world’s third-fastest supercomputer in a record time of three months, and at record low cost of $5.2 million, using off-the-shelf components. Most other machines of its class cost upward of $40 million and take years to assemble. Japan’s Earth Simulator, the number one supercomputer, is said to have cost at least $350 million. The tab was kept low by Varadarajan and his team by using hundreds of student volunteers, who were paid only in...

Virtual hurricanes have appeared in computer models of the Earth's climate for the first time. The swirling storms are visible in the first results from the Earth Simulator in Yokohama, Japan - the world's fastest supercomputer. The results, being presented at a workshop in Cambridge, UK, on Wednesday, are "really quite staggering" says Julia Slingo, Director of the Centre for Global Atmospheric Modelling at the University of Reading, UK. Whereas most climate models divide the Earth into blocks measuring hundreds of kilometres across, the powerful Earth Simulator can run models with cells as small as 10 kilometres. This means that...

Using several new technologies and more than 1,000 dual-processor Power Mac G5 computers, Virginia Tech University is building a supercomputer cluster that is likely to rank among the fastest in the world.In addition to the G5 machines, the university said it is using a beta version of the latest release of OS X, new networking hardware from Mellanox and Cisco, and cutting-edge configuration and cooling technologies to build the powerful cluster for a fraction of the price of a traditional supercomputer."The total price tag is probably a factor of 10 lower than a machine in this class in the past,"...

BLUFFDALE -- Linux Networx Inc., already the proud parent of the world's third-fastest supercomputer, on Thursday boasted it is building an even more powerful system for the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The $10 million contract calls for delivery next month to the New Mexico lab's Metropolis Center for Modeling and Simulation of what will be one of the largest Linux-based clusters -- a supercomputer melding 2,816 AMD Opteron processors -- and among the fastest Linux Intel-based supercomputers in the world. Dubbed "Lightning," Los Alamos' newest mega-brain will come with a theoretical performance of 11.26 teraflops (Tflops), or 11.26 trillion calculations...

Advanced Micro Devices Inc. said it would supply 2,000 Opteron microprocessor chips for a supercomputer project supported by the Chinese government, opening a front in the Sunnyvale, Calif., company's battle with rival chip maker Intel Corp. of Santa Clara, Calif. The project, dubbed the Red Grid, is being developed in Beijing by the state-backed National Research Center for Intelligent Computing Systems and an associated company, Dawning Information Industry Co. Red Grid's first product, the Dawning 4000A model, is expected to be one of the fastest supercomputers in the world and the fastest in China. An AMD spokesman said the company...

June 6, 2003 New I.B.M. Supercomputer to Begin Its Weather WorkBy JOHN MARKOFF he nation's most powerful supercomputer for weather forecasting is scheduled to go online today, I.B.M. said yesterday, a machine that may eventually rival the Japanese Earth Simulator as the world's fastest supercomputer.The new computer, with a theoretical peak computing power of 7.3 trillion operations a second, is expected to be enhanced over the next few years, and it may reach speeds up to 100 trillion operations a second by 2009, I.B.M. said.It ranks third in the United States in speed, behind two Hewlett-Packard machines at Los...

The Indian government-run Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) has designed a parallel-processing 1 TFLOP (trillion floating point operations per second) supercomputer, scalable up to 16 TFLOPs and available on a build-to-order basis. C-DAC was set up in 1988 with the objective of designing a supercomputer, after India's bid to purchase a supercomputer from the U.S. for weather forecasting, fell foul of U.S. restrictions on exports of high performance computers to India. The first supercomputer from C-DAC, the PARAM (for PARAllel Machine) 8000 was introduced in 1991 with a rating of 1 GFLOP (billion floating point operations per second)....