Cray has finally clawed IBM back from the lead position on the Top500 Supercomputer chip-measuring contest. After just missing out on the title to
IBM's Roadrunner last year, Cray's XT5 supercomputer (aka,
Jaguar) at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee received an update from quad- to six-core Opteron processors to boast a 2.3 petaflop per second performance peak (theoretical) and 1.75 petaflops as measured by the Linpack benchmark; a feat requiring almost a quarter million AMD cores. IBM's Roadrunner, the very first supercomputer to race
past the petaflop per second threshold, managed
just 1.042 petaflops by comparison. Remember, one petaflop per second is equivalent to one quadrillion calculations per second. Of course, chip makers put their own spins on the list by noting that 4 of the top 5 systems depend on AMD for performance while Intel can be found powering 402 of the Top500. Video of the AMD processor upgrade procedure can be found after the break.
posted November 16th 2009 3:19AM
I'm goign to kill the first person to ask:
"But willl it run Crysis?"
on medium resolution with 800x600 - yes ; on high resolution with 1600x1400 - no
But the real question is; Will it run Crysis 2?
not until you go back home and tell the wife that you built the world's fastest... Oh wait, she doesn't care. :/
These "supercomputers" aren't even impressive anymore. They're not making any great hardware or technological improvements. They're not even making the components. They're just using off the shelf AMD and Intel CPUs.
It's as if whoever has the most money can buy the most number of CPUs and thus has the fastest pseudocomputer.
And it won't even run Crysis (literally).
@Kurian: While it's true that they are using off the shelf processors for the fastest super computers, IBM's supercomputer design is pretty far from 'being off the shelf.' I don't know much about Cray's current computers, but IBM is planned to surpass 10 petaflops by 2012. It's also worth noting that IBM doesn't just use AMD processors. IBM's cell processor is also used in their Roadrunner design. Plus the petaflop was passed over a year ago...where have you been Cray?
* nerdgasm *
AAHHhhh dear god!
CRYSIS JOKES MUST DIE.
I think everyone REALLY wants to know: Will it Blend WHILE running Crysis using a Shamwow and a Smart mop to clean it all up?
Can it run Crysis, etc
hi5!
-------- Is it just me? Or does it seem wrong that the Worlds fastest Computer would be stationed in Tennessee? -------
Boom in the shot... boom in the shot!
If Intel is supposedly king of chips why do supercomputers use AMD opterons for the most part?
Dare I say "because they're cheap"
You didnt read that right.
4 of the top 5 are AMD
HOWEVER
402 of top 500 are intel
Thats 80.4% of the larger sampling having intel. Just an oddity that the very top super computers use AMD, must be a cost issue.
I don't think so, Intel supply 402 out of the top 500, AMD has 42 and IBM have 52, according to el reg anyway. (Yes I know that doesn't add up to 500, I guess the other must be Sparc based)
nah, the remainder will be the old g5 power macs that are still floating around ;)
In corporate and consumer america, you buy products based on the advertising. hence, intel wins.
in the world of engineering, you design the best computer you can. thus, AMD wins the top supercomputer spots.
Because of HyperTransport, it makes for much better Multi-Chip systems.
I bet the lower tier supercomputers are running intel CPU's because they are older, from a time when AMD didn't have a competing product.
One major drawback for Intel is how they keep changing CPU sockets all the time. AMD stays with the same socket for much longer making it easier to upgrade existing hardware with new CPU's.
Sad thing is, AMD do produce good chips. Intel can just pump out new and more advanced chips because their research budget is practically 100x what AMD has to work with.
Hopefully AMD will catch a break with this anti-trust suite they just won, and Intel will be have to stop bribing manufacturers with discounts and AMD chips will appear in more mainstream systems.
The reason the top supercomputers use AMD is because of several factors, most processing of data for energy used, cheap, and they scale better then you are using 4-8 cpus on a motherboard.
I'm no expert on this, by any means, but somehow it seems more significant to me that AMD powers four out of the top five supercomputers than that Intel powers more of the runners-up...
I think it just shows that unless you want to scale up to utterly ridiculous numbers of CPUs-like say, a friggin' quarter million six-core CPUs-that intel processors are going to be faster. The AMD stuff is better for uber-multicore and multicpu configurations but most of us don't run 1.5 million cores.
Then again cost might also be part of the reason since 250,000 intel chips would likely cost a bit more money.
It has 224,256 cores, so it only has 37,376 processors. Each processor is about $1000 each, so it would cost about $37,376,000 for the chips alone although I'm sure they get a nice volume discount. ; )
Man thats quick!!!!
and yes, that is what she said!
Will it run Adobe's Flash?
Yes, but choppy if it's 720p
lol not if its runnin linux haha
hehe cray is microsoft buddy
"hehe cray is microsoft buddy"
No.
in GHZ, how fast is this?
I believe it's 1.75 million Ghz, or 1,750,000 Ghz. That's still a little behind the N270 Atom, but I hear it runs Android nicely.
It's not possible to multiply the Ghz since you can't run processors in series, so it's actually 2.6Ghz overall speed.
Even if you could, it would actually be around 580Thz.
Same reason they don't advertise a quad core Xeon as running at 12Ghz, because you know they would if they could.
And YES, it runs at a true 64 bits bandwidth...mostly. ;)
'cept, it still doesn't have many great games for the platform. ;'(
Still want to see how it fairs against the Playstation or Dreamcast, though.
Yeah he went to college for 4 years to put new chips in day in and day out. This is why I'm not studying computer engineering.
Your mom goes to college
I'm sure he's just happy to still have a job in the tech industry with just a B.S. at his age..
Jaguar, I'm really happy for you, and imma let you finish, but.... oh, you already did.
best innuendo of the day!
That was the best use of that overplayedout line. Well played.
@Todd Clarke it's been 4 days and I'm still laughing...
Never send a coyote to do a jaguar's job.
Will it run OSX?
im gonna kill you for suggesting a rotten fruit for an jaguar. jaguars believe in lucky number 7
petaflop is not a singular version of the abbreviation petaflops
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS
according to the blurb, this thing's is running at 2.3 peta-floating point ops per second per second...meaning it's accelerating?
Seriously:
FLOPS: FLoating point Operations Per Second
petaFLOPS: 2^50 FLoating point Operations Per Second
.. flop: To fail completely.
Sorry for being a stickler but this ain't the times, this is engadget, where tech details matter.
I was wondering how well it played MW2, crysis is so last year