SGI Claims Lead In Supercomputer Race
Although a victor won't be declared for two weeks yet, Silicon Graphics has become the second computer maker to boast that its machinery is leading a competition for world's fastest supercomputer.
Source: c|netThe system, a $50 million Linux-based NASA machine called Columbia, which SGI sold in July, can perform 42.7 trillion calculations per second, or 42.7 teraflops, SGI announced Tuesday. However, that speed isn't the final word: The system used only four-fifths of the 10,240 Intel Itanium 2 processors in the full machine being uncloaked at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. The speed is a notch faster than the 36.1 teraflops IBM reported for its Blue Gene/L system in September. That performance was enough to edge Big Blue ahead of NEC's Earth Simulator, which since 2002 has led a list of the world's 500 fastest supercomputers. IBM's test, performed Sept. 16, also is likely to be outdone by a later score.
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This thing needs 8192 processors to hit 42.7 tflops. Let's see.. Who's the winner? Oops, Opteron!
Not to mention, the Cray can support up to 30k Opterons.
/me readies collection plate for evil experiment
Kingfish says, "More appropriately.. How many per minute? Well, given that a single opteron requires about 9 minutes per frame for a 140 point work unit, 30,000 Opterons can do the same frame in about .0003 seconds! That all works out to about .03 seconds for a workunit, that's about 2000 WUs a minute!"