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top500 posts

Roadrunner beats Jaguar in TOP500 supercomputer rankings, cartoon antics strangely absent

by Tim Stevens posted Nov 17th 2008 at 9:51AM

While titles like "world's fastest" and "world's largest" are fleeting at best, it's rare that we see such things taken down this quickly. Last week Cray delivered a big dish of braggadocio, talking up its 1.64 petaflop XT Jaguar supercomputer as the fastest (non-classified) machine in the world. Now, like some rocket skate-wearing coyote who's run out of thrust, it's been stymied by IBM's Roadrunner, deployed at Los Alamos. TOP500 is the authority on these matters and that list's latest rankings place Roadrunner in first place with a speed of 1.105 petaflops; Cray's Jag comes in second with a paltry 1.059. What about that 1.64 figure from last week? That was the hypothetical limit, and while it did deliver real-world performance of 1.3 petaflops for the folks at Oak Ridge, TOP500 relies on the Linpack benchmark for its ratings and apparently the Jag just couldn't deliver the goods there. Perhaps, Cray, it's time to make another call to ACME -- or AMD as it were.

IBM's BlueGene/L: world's fastest supercomputer, 3 years running

by Thomas Ricker posted Nov 13th 2007 at 7:04AM

The TOP500 supercomputing list was just announced and IBM's BlueGene/L system has kept its crown. In fact, IBM's and the Department of Energy's co-developed monster at Lawrence Livermore has occupied the number 1 position since 2004. Of course, an upgrade was required boost the Linpack benchmark to 478.2 TFlop/s from the 280.6TFlop/s the machine was clocking just 6 months ago. The top 10 swath is dominated by the US, Sweden, and Germany with India breaking into the list for the first time at the number 4 position with its HP Cluster Platform 3000 BL460c system measuring 102.8TFlop/s.

[Via Impress]

BMW getting supercomputer; iDrive still sucks, though

by Cyrus Farivar posted Dec 16th 2006 at 1:42AM

BMW, one of the world's top auto makers, has decided that it needs an equivalent amount of horsepower for its supercomputers in its Switzerland development center, and thus struck a deal with Intel to purchase the Albert 2, a new supercomputer that works at 12.8 teraflops per second to help crunch numbers for the next generation of BMW engines and cars. That's not the fastest in the world, but it recently ranked 60th on the Top 500 supercomputer list -- a pretty respectable showing. But BMW and Intel are thinking bigger than just one supercomputer, as Intel will also get a huge sponsorship for BMW's Formula 1 cars (pictured), and in exchange the chipmaker will switch up every computer under BMW's roof to Intel-powered machines. Regardless of how fast the Albert 2 is, BMW is going to need to switch into fifth gear if it's really going to present the first Albert 2-designed F1 car, as planned, by January 16.

P.S. -Some of us at Engadget do actually love iDrive. We're just playing around, BMW.

[Thanks Terry B, via Heise]

Tyan Typhoon 600 series reaches 256 gigflops for "personal supercomputing"

by Cyrus Farivar posted Nov 16th 2006 at 10:07AM

Remember that 16-core Tyan Typhoon personal supercomputer we told you about back in March? Yeah, that was before all the dual-core and now quad-core action started flooding the market. Well, we've just laid our eyes on the Typhoon 600 series, which is loaded to the brim with Clovertown chips, reaching 256 gigaflops worth of processing power from a single outlet. Of course, the Typhoon isn't exactly going to crack the Top500 list of supercomputers, but it'll probably work much better than that those decked out quad-core getups we've seen thus far. If you really need that many chips, just be prepared not to flip out when you see the £10,000 ($19,080) pricetag, which works out to about 25,600,000 flops per pound sterling.