Free Republic

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)....

Japanese supercomputer dwarfs U.S. machines LIVERMORE - U.S. supercomputers have been the world's most powerful since the first high-performance machines analyzed virtual nuclear blasts, climate change and the makeup of the universe. Now, one built in Japan with an "old" design runs five times faster than the previous record holder, a machine that simulates nuclear tests at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Japan's Earth Simulator supercomputer hasn't quite rattled the United States like the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik in 1957. But it does highlight some drawbacks of recent U.S. machines - and it has made more than a few scientists...