Less than a month after IBM claimed the world’s fastest computer crown from NEC, the Japanese company announced it is trying to win it back with a new supercomputer that will be available at the end of the year.
NEC’s SX-8 is a vector supercomputer that has a peak processing performance of 65 teraflops (trillion calculations per second), said Susumu Sakamoto, a spokesman for NEC in Tokyo. That is almost twice as fast as the 36.01 teraflops achieved in September by a prototype version of IBM’s Blue Gene supercomputer. That performance, measured using the standard Linpack benchmark, made Blue Gene the fastest supercomputer in the world, beating the NEC-built Earth Simulator supercomputer, which had managed a sustained performance of 35.86 teraflops on the same benchmark. However, the SX-8 hasn’t edged out Blue Gene yet. Its performance figure is only an estimate, albeit one NEC thinks it can achieve, Sakamoto said.
65 teraflops! cool… -KF
Source: PC World
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