DoE, IBM Supercomputer Shatters LINPACK Test

KingFishKingFish
edited November 2004 in Science & Tech
The U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) Thursday said that a BlueGene/L supercomputer built by IBM for nuclear arms research runs at a record 70.72 teraflops, making it the fastest computer on the LINPACK benchmark test.
Jack Dongarra, LINPACK test creator and co-author of the well-regarded Top500 report of the world's most powerful computing systems, confirmed the record in an e-mail to internetnews.com. The Top500 authors use the Fortran-based LINPACK benchmark as their "yardstick of performance" for gauging the performance of a dedicated system for solving a dense system of linear equations. Teraflops, or one trillion floating points per second, are the key metrics when determining the processing speed of computing systems. The DoE, whose National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) worked on the system for years with IBM, is using the machine for the nation's Stockpile Stewardship Program to study how the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile is aging. With BlueGene/L, NNSA is able to do this without risky underground nuclear testing.
Source: Internet News

Comments

  • ThraxThrax 🐌 Austin, TX Icrontian
    edited November 2004
    Someone needs to benchmark that new Cray computer running up to 30k Opterons.
  • KingFishKingFish
    edited November 2004
    I'd certainly volunteer. :D
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