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VT nears completion of HokieSpeed, world's 96th most powerful supercomputer
If basking in the presence of a powerful supercomputer is on your list of "must-haves" when selecting a proper university, then you may wish to fire off an admissions application to the Hokies at Virginia Tech. The school's HokieSpeed system is now in its final stages of testing, which combines 209 separate computers, each powered by dual six-core Xeon E5645 CPUs and two NVIDIA M2050 / C2050 448-core GPUs, with a single-precision peak processing capability of 455 teraflops. To put things in perspective, HokieSpeed is now the 96th most powerful computer in the world, and yet it was built for merely $1.4 million in loose change -- the majority of which came from a National Science Foundation grant. As a further claim to fame, HokieSpeed is the 11th most energy-efficient supercomputer in the world. Coming soon, the system will drive a 14-foot wide by four-foot tall visualization wall, which is to consist of eight 46-inch Samsung 3D televisions humming in unison. After all, with virtually limitless potential, these scientists will need a fitting backdrop for all those Skyrim sessions. The full PR follows the break, complete with commentary from the system's mastermind, Professor Wu Feng.
China's Tianhe-1A is world's fastest supercomputer, plans to usurp the West now complete
It happened. China just passed the US and the world with the reveal of the world's fastest supercomputer. The fully operational Tianhe-1A, located at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin, scored 2.507 petaflops as measured by the LINPACK benchmark. That moves it past Cray's 2.3 petaflops Jaguar located at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee. Tianhe-1A achieved the record using 7,168 NVIDIA Tesla M2050 GPUs and 14,336 Intel Xeon CPUs consuming 4.04 megawatts. Knowing that 10 petaflops is within reach by 2012, we'll see if Tianhe-1A can maintain its title when the new Top500 supercomputers list is released next week.
