BlueGene/L Puts the Hammer Down

OnePragmatist writes "Cyberinfrastructure Technology Watch is reporting that BlueGene/L has nearly doubled its performance to 135.3 Teraflops by doubling its processors. That seems likely to keep it at no. 1 on the Top500 when the next round comes out in June. But it will be interesting to see how it does when they finally get around to testing it against the HPC Challenge benchmark, which has gained adherents as being more indicative of how a HPC system will peform with various different types of applicatoins."

Finally...

[Nos.]

Maybe this thing can keep the WoW service running.

The real question is....

[bryan986]

...how do we slashdot it?

Avoiding the obvious memes...

[yuriismaster]

How much processing power does one need for any certain application? I know that projects like World Community Grid need massive amounts of computing power, but seriously, 135 TFlops?

...ok I couldn't resist

Imagine a beowulf cluster of these....

Yes but what ..

[Anonymous Coward]

..about overclocking it?

and what type of frame rate do you get with Quake?

Re:Yes but what ..

[Anonymous Coward]

Eh, you could probably run the top 20 latest games at once, 10 instances each, all using complete software rendering (but emulating all the 3d hardware stuff) and have room to spare.

Holy crap my visual cortex just exploded thinking about that.

Re:Yes but what ..

[OccidentalSlashy]

Does it make the Internet faster?

Re:similarities

[TetryonX]

If the BlueGene/L can grant me any wish I want for collecting 7 of them, sign me up.

Get that thing....

[blobzorz]

Now to get that thing folding now...

Maybe it will be able to...

[EvanED]

...host a spell check for Slashdot! ...as being more indicative of how a HPC system will peform with various different types of applicatoins."

Re:Maybe it will be able to...

[CoolGopher]

I'm sure you mean a spelling checker. It's WoW that needs the spell check... combat resurrection for priests, anyone?!

Windows HPC

[Cruithne]

Oh man, I *so* wanna put Windows HPC on this thing!

Re:Imagine

[mrseigen]

Imagine an exponential beowulf cluster.

I wonder...

[dteichman2]

1.) How many frames/sec is that in Counter-Strike?
2.) How about CS:S?
3.) If Apache 2 were installed on it, could it survive a slashdotting?
4.) How fast could it run Avida?

Re:Windows HPC

[ozmanjusri]

You'll probably need it if you want to turn on the eye candy in Longhorn...

Re:Yes but what ..

[OneDeeTenTee]

and what type of frame rate do you get with Quake?

It speculatively pre-renders every possible frame for the next 90 seconds.

Blinking Lights

[DumbSwede]

Slashdot is still using the 1976 Cray-1 as the icon for supercomputing, and I think its safe to say supercomputing styling has gone down hill since. Not that these things should be like cars, though here at Slashdot we tend to salivate over them like they were. Don't get me started on people who are into case mods.

I remember seeing a news article on TV recently about NASA and their upgrades to computer horse power for doing flight simulations and design work. The picture they showed? A late 80's connection machine. You know the beast, 8 black cubes glued together to make one big cube with hundreds of blinking LEDs over the faces, one for each of the 65536 simple processors. Sort of a Borg at Christmas time affair. Stock footage to be sure, and the news outlets trot it out every time the word supercomputer is used. At least they've quit showing IBM Model 726 Tape Units spinning reel-to-reel tapes back and forth as a show of awesome computing power.

Does anyone realize...

[suitepotato]

...that by the time Duke Nukem Forever launches, this will be the level of computing power on every desktop? I can hardly wait for Windows mean-time-to-failure to be measured in femtoseconds.