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As perhaps the clearest evidence yet of the computing power of sophisticated but inexpensive video-game consoles, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has assembled a supercomputer from an army of Sony PlayStation 2's. The resulting system, with components purchased at retail prices, cost a little more than $50,000. The center's researchers believe the system may be capable of a half trillion operations a second, well within the definition of supercomputer, although it may not rank among the world's 500 fastest supercomputers. Perhaps the most striking aspect of the project, which uses the open...

(PhysOrg.com) -- UMass Dartmouth Physics Professor Gaurav Khanna and UMass Dartmouth Principal Investigator Chris Poulin have created a step-by-step guide to building a home-brewed supercomputer that can reduce the cost of university and general computing research.Found at http://www.ps3cluster.org , the resource fully illustrates how to create a fully functioning and high performance supercomputer with the Sony Playstation 3.Last year, Khanna’s construction of a small supercomputer using eight Sony-donated Playstation 3 gaming consoles made headlines nationwide in the scientific community. On the consoles, he is solving complex equations designed to predict the properties of gravitational waves generated by the black holes...

(PhysOrg.com) -- Using only the computing power of 16 Sony Playstation 3 gaming consoles, scientists at The University of Alabama in Huntsville and the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, have solved a mystery about the speed at which vibrating black holes stop vibrating.It may be the first time this kind of research has been conducted exclusively on a PS3 cluster: A related 2007 UMass Dartmouth/UAHuntsville project using a smaller PS3 cluster also used a "traditional" supercomputer to run its simulations. The biggest advantage of the console cluster — the PS3 Gravity Grid — at UMass Dartmouth was the cost saving, said...

Dr Gaurav Khanna is a professor at the University of Massachusetts. He has been renting supercomputers at NASA and the US National Science Foundation for US$20,000-$30,000 a year to run complicated calculations on just how much radiation is emitted in the process of a black hole swallowing a star... "For US$4,000 or so, I can get eight PS3s that can do the same task that I'd do on a supercomputer. For a one-time cost, I have this resource I can use privately. I can use it indefinitely over and over again. That's hugely attractive. That's why I considered the project....

Rocky Marciano, Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier and Mike Tyson; Colossus, Cray, ASCI Red and Blue Gene. The names of boxing's heavyweights are never forgotten - and it's the same with the champs of the supercomputing world. These machines truly are like no others. Each is computationally more muscular than its predecessor; and for a while, each has claimed the title of the fastest computer in the world. But, as the calamitous fall of 'Iron' Mike Tyson showed us, champions are built to be felled. And so we've seem supercomputers come and go, growing from single processor machines capable of a...

Seven months after IBM delivered the world's fastest supercomputer, it has announced an even speedier one. IBM said on Tuesday it is developing the technology for its new Sequoia computer, with delivery scheduled in 2011 to the Department of Energy for use at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Sequoia will chug along at 20 petaflops per second and is one order of magnitude quicker than its predecessor. The earlier machine, delivered in June to the Energy Department, broke the 1 petaflop barrier. Peta is a term for quadrillion and FLOP stands for floating point operations per second. Sequoia, and a smaller...

WASHINGTON, Jul 10, 2008 (UPI via COMTEX) -- The IBM Corp. says the U.S. government has purchased a supercomputer to provide improved data for the nation's military and commercial ocean-going vessels. IBM said the U.S. Department of Defense will use the Power 575 Hydro-Cluster, water-cooled supercomputer to provide some of the most detailed models of ocean waves, currents and temperature ever constructed to help scientists predict the behavior of the oceans with incredible precision.

An American military supercomputer, assembled from components originally designed for video game machines, has reached a long-sought-after computing milestone by processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second. ...To put the performance of the machine in perspective, Thomas P. D’Agostino, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said that if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day. ...The Roadrunner is based on a radical design that includes 12,960 chips that...

MOSCOW: A Russian university has bought one of the world's most powerful supercomputers, the first time that such sophisticated technology has been exported to the former Soviet Union, makers IBM said on Thursday. The Moscow State University has selected a Blue Gene device capable of 27.8 trillion operations per second to use in research on nanotechnology and scientific applications such as modelling the heart, an IBM spokesman said. "This agreement with IBM heralds a new era of supercomputing in Russia," said Viktor Sadovnichiy, rector of the university, in a statement. The world's most powerful supercomputer is a Blue Gene device...

IBM on Thursday unveiled a technical advancement related to the use of light to carry large amounts of data quickly among cores within a microprocessor, taking the company closer to developing a chip that may one day run notebooks with the horsepower of today's supercomputers. The breakthrough revolves around a device used to transform electrical impulses into beams of light. The device, called a modulator, is similar to what's used today in optical networks built by telecommunication companies. IBM scientists say they have found a way to shrink the modulator to a size where it can fit within a multi-core...

Supercomputers may soon be the same size as a laptop if IBM brings to market research detailed on Thursday, in which pulses of light replace electricity to make data transfer between processor cores on a chip up to one-hundred times faster. The technology, called silicon nanophotonics, replaces some of the wires on a chip with pulses of light on tiny optical fibers for quicker and more power-efficient data transfers between cores on a chip, said Will Green, research scientist at IBM. The technology, which can transfers data up to a distance of a few centimeters, is about 100 times faster...

Japan's NEC boasts world's most powerful computer Japan's NEC Corp. on Thursday announced the launch of what it called the world's most powerful supercomputer on the market, meant for advanced use in the sciences. Since the 1970s, major computer makers such as NEC, Fujitsu and Hitachi in Japan and IBM, Intel and SGI in the United States have been vying to build the most powerful computer, measured in terms of gigaflops and teraflops. NEC said that its latest supercomputer, called SX-9, is capable of calculating 839 teraflops -- or 839 trillion floating point operations per second. "The SX-9 has been...

What if your desktop computer could run 100 times faster than a PC and were simple enough for a high school student to program? That’s not an idle question. Researchers at the University of Maryland have built a prototype of a “desktop supercomputer” that can do just that. The new computer is at least three years from reaching commercial markets, but it could have a big effect in industries that process large loads of data. They include the pharmaceutical, aerospace, military and entertainment industries, for applications such as drug modeling, computer-aided design and digital content creation. The Explicit Multi-Threading (XMT)...

Student, prof build budget supercomputer August 30 , 2007 When Tim Brom 07’ set out to build a budget supercomputer with Calvin computer science professor Joel Adams, he didn’t know the product of his efforts might end up in his checked baggage headed for England. Brom, now a graduate student at the University of Kentucky continuing his studies in computer science, worked with Adams to build Microwulf, a machine that is among the smallest and least expensive supercomputers on the planet. “It’s small enough to check on an airplane or fit next to a desk,” said Brom. This may prove...

A prototype of what may be the next generation of personal computers has been developed by researchers in the University of Maryland's A. James Clark School of Engineering. Capable of computing speeds 100 times faster than current desktops, the technology is based on parallel processing on a single chip.Parallel processing is an approach that allows the computer to perform many different tasks simultaneously, a sharp contrast to the serial approach employed by conventional desktop computers. The prototype developed by Uzi Vishkin and his Clark School colleagues uses a circuit board about the size of a license plate on which they...

Call it "supercomputing smackdown." Today, at the International Supercomputing Conference 2007 (ISC07) in Dresden, Germany, the Top500 group announced its latest list of the top 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world. To say it's a competitive list would be an understatement and few of the players can hold top spots long without constant improvements. With a few exceptions, this June's list has seen a reshuffling since the last list was published last November. If there is such a thing as a winner in such a competition, however, that would be IBM (Quote). Just as last November – the top...

OAK RIDGE - Oak Ridge National Laboratory's newest computer is purring like a cat, and maybe that's to be expected. It is, after all, a part of the lab's "Jaguar" system, a Cray XT4 supercomputer that's reported to be the nation's fastest machine for open scientific research. Sixty-eight new cabinets for Jaguar arrived here from Cray's manufacturing center in Wisconsin late last year and were installed on the second floor of the National Center for Computational Sciences. "It's going through the acceptance testing," Thomas Zacharia, the associate lab director of scientific computing, said during a visit earlier this week. "It's...

HAL may soon be getting some company. But unlike the famous computer companion in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the first space-based supercomputer — so described because it will be by far the most powerful computer in space — is already nearing reality. Engineering researchers at the University of Florida and Honeywell Aerospace are designing and building the computer projected to operate as much as 100 times faster than any computer in space today. Expected to be launched aboard a NASA rocket on a test mission in 2009, the computer is needed to process rapidly increasing amounts of data...

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...