Inside Tsubame, Japan's GPU-Based Supercomputer

Startled Hippo writes "Japan's Tsubame supercomputer was ranked 29th-fastest in the world in the latest Top 500 ranking with a speed of 77.48T Flops (floating point operations per second) on the industry-standard Linpack benchmark. Why is it so special? It uses NVIDIA GPUs. Tsubame includes hundreds of graphics processors of the same type used in consumer PCs, working alongside CPUs in a mixed environment that some say is a model for future supercomputers serving disciplines like material chemistry." Unlike the GPU-based Tesla, Tsubame definitely won't be mistaken for a personal computer.

What is a GPU?

[hurfy]

When it has no graphics out? It is still a GRAPHICS Processing Unit when it doesn't calculate any graphics and doesn't display any graphics. HUH? ;)

They have a whole lot of these boosting a whole lot of quad-cores.

Supercomputer or many not-so-super computers?

[marciot]

What makes a supercomputer *a* supercomputer, as opposed to a network of not-necessarily-super computers which all happen to be in the same building and connected to the same high-speed network? By the way this is described, it certainly seems to be a network of many computers working together, rather than one single almighty computer.