Petaflops
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Japan wants the world's fastest supercomputer by 2018
Our world is in transition, with automation and digitization edging-out more humane forms of industrial labor. Some countries are actively pushing against that, but others, like Japan, are running head-first towards the future. The nation is believed to be pushing to build the world's fastest supercomputer in an attempt to revitalize its recent malaise. Reuters is reporting that officials will spend $173 million on a machine capable of achieving 130 petaflops and besting current world number one, China's Sunway TaihuLight.
Cray unleashes 100 petaflop XC30 supercomputer with up to a million Intel Xeon cores
Cray has just fired a nuclear salvo in the supercomputer wars with the launch of its XC30, a 100 petaflop-capable brute that can scale up to one million cores. Developed in conjunction with DARPA, the Cascade-codenamed system uses a new type of architecture called Aries interconnect and Intel Xeon E5-2600 processors to easily leapfrog its recent Titan sibling, the previous speed champ. That puts Cray well ahead of rivals like China's Tianhe-2, and the company will aim to keep that edge by supercharging future versions with Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors and NVIDIA Tesla GPUs. High-end research centers have placed $100 million worth of orders so far (though oddly, DARPA isn't one of them yet), and units are already shipping in limited numbers -- likely by the eighteen-wheeler-full, from the looks of it.
NNSA Sequoia supercomputer takes worlds fastest title, prevents nuclear testing
Fujitsu's 10.51 petaflop K supercomputer is pretty fast, but does it pack enough computational oomph to stave off underground nuclear testing? Probably -- but the NNSA's new sixteen petaflop rig does it better. According to the National Nuclear Security Administration, a supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, dubbed Sequoia, is now the fastest supercomputer on the planet, clocking in at 16.32 sustained petaflops. "Sequoia will provide a more complete understanding of weapons performance, notably hydrodynamics and properties of materials at extreme pressure sand temperatures," says NNSA Director of Advanced Simulation and Computing Bob Meisner, explaining that supercomputer simulations will "support the effort to extend the life of aging weapons systems." Translation? Sequoia will help the NNSA keep the US' nuclear stockpile stable without resorting to nuclear testing, or put simply, more computational power, fewer explosions. We can't think of a better thing to do with 98,304 compute nodes, 1.6 million cores and 1.6 petabytes of memory spread across 96 racks -- can you? Check out the official press release after the break.
Eyes-on the innards of Fujitsu's K supercomputer (updated)
Fujitsu's K supercomputer was on our radar before it was even completed, and naturally, we let you know when it smoked the competition and became the supercomputing speed king. So, when we had the opportunity to see a piece of K at Fujitsu's North America Technology Forum today, we couldn't pass it up. In case you forgot, K is a massive machine powered by 864 racks with 24 boards per rack housing SPARC64 CPUs. We got to see one of those boards, and Yuichiro Ajima -- who designed the inter-connection chips (ICC) on them -- was gracious enough to give us some more info on this most super of supercomputers.As you can see in the gallery above, each board has extensive plumbing to keep the SPARC silicon running at a manageable 32 - 35 degrees Celsius (90 - 95 Fahrenheit) under load. Underneath that copper cooling system lies four processors interspersed between 32 memory modules (with 2GB per module) and four ICCs lined up next to the board's rack interconnect ports. Currently, the system takes 30 megawatts to do its thing, though Ajima informed us that K's theoretical max electricity consumption is about double that -- for perspective, that means K could consume the entire output of some solar power plants. When asked if there were plans to add more racks should Fujitsu's supercomputer lose its crown, Ajima-san said that while possible, there are no plans to do so -- we'll see if that changes should a worthy opponent present itself.Update: Turns out the K's power consumption resides around 13 megawatts, with a max consumption of 16MW at its current configuration. The facility in Kobe, Japan where K resides can deliver up to 24 megawatts, so expansion is possible, but none is currently planned.
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.
Fujitsu K supercomputer will do 10 petaflops in 2012, eat Crays for breakfast
10's a nice round number, isn't it? Round, yes, but also wildly impressive when you put the word "petaflops" behind it as Fujitsu has done with its upcoming K supercomputer, which will be able to crunch through 10 quadrillion operations every second. Compare that to the current champ of processing farms, Cray's Jaguar, which can handle only (only!) 1.75 petaflops of workload and you'll know that we're talking about a seminal leap in performance. Japan's Riken Research Institute is the fortunate addressee on the crates of ultrafast SPARC64 VIIIfx processors that Fujitsu is now shipping out and the current plan is to have everything up and running by 2012. In total, there'll be 80,000 CPUs, each possessing 8 cores running at 2.2GHz, which will be housed within 800 racks. So yes, there'll be a machine somewhere on the Japanese isle with 640,000 processing cores at its disposal. Feeling safe?
