"Intrepid" Supercomputer Fastest In the World

Stony Stevenson writes "The US Department of Energy's (DoE) high performance computing system is now the fastest supercomputer in the world for open science, according to the Top 500 list of the world's fastest computers. The list was announced this week during the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany. IBM's Blue Gene/P, known as 'Intrepid,' is located at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility and is also ranked third fastest overall. The supercomputer has a peak performance of 557 teraflops and achieved a speed of 450.3 teraflops on the Linpack application used to measure speed for the Top 500 rankings. According to the list, 74.8 percent of the world's supercomputers (some 374 systems) use Intel processors, a rise of 4 percent in six months. This represents the biggest slice of the supercomputer cake for the firm ever."

Re:So ... let met be the first to ask ...

[Gewalt]

No. Super computers tend to not have much in the way of graphics cards. Vista will not use software rendering. But for a mere 500$, you could upgrade the beast so it could.

Booooring

[Reality Master 101]

I liked (back in the Old Days) when supercomputer rankings where based on linear, single processor performance. Now it's just how much money can you afford to put a lot of processors in a single place. That was a real test of engineering. By the current standards, Google (probably) has the largest supercomputer in the world.

Unfortunately, single core performance seems to have hit the wall.

Beowulf Cluster of PS3s

[Doc Ruby]

The supercomputer has a peak performance of 557 teraflops and achieved a speed of 450.3 teraflops on the Linpack application

The PS3's RSX video chip [wikipedia.org] from nVidia does 1.8TFLOPS on specialized graphics instructions. If you're rendering, you get close to that performance. The PS3's CPU, the Cell [wikipedia.org], gets theoretical 204GFLOPS on its more general purpose (than the RSX) onchip DSP-type SPEs, and some more on its onchip 3.4GHz PPC. A higher end Cell with 8 (instead of 7 - less one for "chip utilities" - in the PS3's Cell) delivers about 100GFLOPS on Linpack 4096x4096. Overall a PS3 has about 2TFLOPS, so 278 PS3s have a theoretical peak equal to this supercomputer. But they'd cost only $11,200. YMMV.

The summary is wrong - both Intel and AMD together

[Tweenk]

It's not Intel chips that have 74.8% share, it's x86 chips. Those are produced by both AMD and Intel. In fact, there are 7 systems with x86 hardware in the top 10, and the 4 faster ones use AMD Opterons (Crays are also Opterons) while the 3 slower use Xeons.