Japan Designers Shoot For Supercomputer On A chip

KingFishKingFish
edited August 2004 in Science & Tech
RIKEN, an anglicized acronym for Japan's Research Institute of Physical and Chemical Research, described on Tuesday the MDGrape 3, a processor it thinks will become the cornerstone of a computer capable of operating at a petaflop, or a quadrillion operations per second--far faster than the 36 trillion ops supercomputers of today.
Samples of the chip, which was designed for life sciences research, can now perform 230 gigaflops, or 230 billion operations per second, while running at 350MHz, better than standard general-purpose chips. In a worst-case scenario, the chip performs 160 gigaflops at 250MHz, said Makoto Tanji, a researcher with RIKEN's high-performance computing group. Tanji spoke at the Hot Chips conference taking place at Stanford University. The computational power comes, he said, because the chip is specialized for workloads that involve numerous, similar calculations on a comparatively small set of data. This sort of workload is common in the life sciences and bio-nanotechnology field, where researchers need to examine, for example, how a single protein interacts with thousands of different molecules. Consequently, the chip and the computers based on it can be directly compared with general purpose supercomputers only in a limited field, but the processor excels there.
Source: ZD Net

Comments

  • csimoncsimon Acadiana Icrontian
    edited August 2004
    LOL ...ok that had folding written all over it. :fold:
  • KingFishKingFish
    edited August 2004
    Sure did :)

    KF
  • primesuspectprimesuspect Beepin n' Boopin Detroit, MI Icrontian
    edited August 2004
    One petaflop supercomputer == top folder in the world ;D
  • GHoosdumGHoosdum Icrontian
    edited August 2004
    Imagine, say, SM32 running one (or more!) of these processors. Sweeeet.

    /me wipes the drool off his chin.
  • RWBRWB Icrontian
    edited August 2004
    That is really damned cool that it is a mere 350MHz and yet is far far far far far far far far far far far faster than any AMD processor. I say this becuase I have no clue how they really work... and that it just goes to show just how ineffecient our processors really are.

    I probably worded that wrong, maybe someone here will understand what I mean.
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