Japanese supercomputer breaks the petaflop barrier

Japan, which once topped the list of world's fastest supercomputers with NEC's Earth Simulator, has seen its position deteriorate in recent years in the face of faster machines like IBM's 280-teraflop BlueGene/L. Well now it looks like a new Japanese rig is poised to regain the top of the charts, and the most amazing thing about Riken's MDGrape-3 -- besides its claimed 1 petaflop performance -- is the fact that it cost only $9 million to build, giving it a per-gigaflop pricetag of just $15 (compared to the $140/gigaflop cost of IBM's top dog). Developed in conjunction with Hitachi, Intel, and NEC subsidiary SGI Japan, MDGrape-3 is being tasked with helping the pharmaceutical industry model new drugs, as it can calculate the chemical bonding properties of a proposed drug-protein combo in mere seconds. While BlueGene/L contains a whopping 130,000 processors distributed over 65,000 nodes, Riken's closet-sized machine needs only 4,808 chips to achieve four times its speed for certain applications. Oh, and despite the impressive-sounding performance, due to the specialized nature of its design, its unlikely that you'll see MDGrape-3 rocking a game of Doom anytime soon.

[Via Slashdot]

[Turtle D @ Jul 31st 2006 12:59PM]

I wonder if this is the kind of machine we have been waiting for to play Duke Nukem Forever...

[gangstified @ Oct 15th 2007 9:30PM]

no i think its the next super computer due out in 3 more years

[Matthew Brundage @ Jul 31st 2006 1:03PM]

Hmm, and with a cluster of these, local news stations may now be able to accurately predict the weather SIX days in advance.

[Bryan @ Jul 31st 2006 1:07PM]

MDGrape-3 will never top the supercomputing charts - it is not a real supercomputer. Instead, it is a special purpose machine built solely to run ONE very specific program. This article never should have been posted - the claim that MDGrape-3 will top the supercomputing charts is just as wrong as saying that Intel & AMD are about to be upstaged in processor performance by a GPU from nVidia. Sure, a GPU can push more polygons than a CPU. But try websurfing on a GPU - it just won't work. GPUs are built specifically for Graphics, just like MDGrape-3 is built specifically for Molecular Dynamics. MDGrape-3 can't even run the benchmarks needed to get on the supercomputing charts.

[Richard @ Jul 31st 2006 1:12PM]

If it can't play Doom it's not a real computer.

[maxxwizard @ Jul 31st 2006 1:15PM]

"If it can't play Doom it's not a real computer."

Hahaha. For real, playing Doom at 11,128 frames per second is where computer technology is supposed to proceed.

[Volsfan91 @ Jul 31st 2006 1:20PM]

Wonder how well it runs Photoshop.

[Mike @ Jul 31st 2006 1:28PM]

So let's put this in Real World numbers... How many SETI WUs can it crank out in a day? heh. They should run that on there for a week just for fun.

[strider_mt2k @ Jul 31st 2006 1:33PM]

I thought a petaflop was a bad movie made by animal activists!

I'll be here all week, but please, don't try the veal.

[teo @ Jul 31st 2006 1:44PM]

Volsfan- it can render a multi-layered image in Photoshop in just nanoseconds, but it still takes 30s for the program to load and show you the credits.

[Loque @ Jul 31st 2006 2:02PM]

Was it sad that DooM was the first thing that came to my mind?

[Chris @ Jul 31st 2006 2:18PM]

This is not a computer. Think of it as a HUGE ASIC. For specialized research this is definitely the way to go. Don't, however think your are going to run SETI@Home during downtime with this thing.

[padieg @ Jul 31st 2006 3:30PM]

I wonder if it meets the minimum requirements to run Vista.

[Eric @ Jul 31st 2006 8:02PM]

yeah but can it make toast?

if not, my toasters got 1up.

[Juaquin @ Jul 31st 2006 8:41PM]

Everyone knows it doesn't count if it can't play Doom.

[sundar @ Aug 1st 2006 2:43AM]

We are caught between special purpose and general purpose machines. Though MD-Grape can't run Top500 benchmark efficiently, it has achieved 1 petaflops computing power for MD calculations.

[Keith @ Aug 1st 2006 5:19AM]

It is really amazing how computer speed can grow these days. It seems infinite on how much we can push computing towards. http://keith.hostmatrix.org

[Edwin @ Aug 1st 2006 5:25AM]

by padieg
I wonder if it meets the minimum requirements to run Vista.

jajjajajjaa good one padieg

[Ed @ Aug 1st 2006 5:25AM]

by padieg
I wonder if it meets the minimum requirements to run Vista.

jajjajajjaa good one padieg

[CK @ Aug 1st 2006 6:49AM]

how long does it take to boot up?

[Dave @ Aug 1st 2006 10:02AM]

"I wonder if it meets the minimum requirements to run Vista."

my friend, not even a machine built by Jesus himself out of pure gold would have the requirements to run Vista.

[Slavcho @ Sep 11th 2006 6:59PM]

This is not a real supercomputer. And I think it can't even run Windows Vista or any other OS.