New Supercomputer to Be Unveiled
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A Canadian firm is claiming to have taken a quantum leap in technology by producing a computer that can perform 64,000 calculations at once.  D-Wave Systems, Inc., based near Vancouver, says it will unveil its new quantum supercomputer Tuesday, ABC News reports.
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Less than a month after IBM claimed the world&#39;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.
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Forget the Earth Simulator and IBM&#39;s Blue Gene/L, Silicon Graphics (SGI) (Quote, Chart) is laying claim to the fastest supercomputer in the world.
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Sun Microsystems and the University of Texas at Austin are set to flip the switch on a unique supercomputer that will vastly speed up massive data analysis and visualisation to tackle time-critical problems such as weather
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This supercomputer deal is about more than speed.
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Intel will offer a detailed look at a new processor next week during a presentation at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) that should set the stage for an unexpectedly&#160;close battle with Taiwan&#39;s Via Technologies.Intel&#39;s presentation will cover technical details of an unnamed low-power processor that is made using a 45-nanometer process and designed for mobile Internet devices, according to an abstract contained in the ISSCC program. That&#39;s the same general description used by Intel to describe its&#160;upcoming Silverthorne processor.Intel executives declined to confirm whether the ISSCC presentation covers Silverthorne but said the abstract provided an accurate description of the unspecified processor. If the chip described is indeed Silverthorne, the presentation appears set to confirm many rumored details of the chip&#39;s architecture and characteristics.Most importantly, Silverthorne is rumored to be an in-order processor, the same as the processor Intel will detail next week, according to the abstract.In layman&#39;s terms, this means the chip functions like a factory with a single assembly line and is capable of processing one operation at a time. An in-order processor must complete that operation before it can move on to another operation. This is a different chip architecture from that used in Intel&#39;s other processors but it&#39;s the same as Via Technologies&#39; low-power C7 chip, which has proved popular among the portable device makers that are Silverthorne&#39;s target market.The processor that Intel will discuss next week is also a dual-issue processor, just as Silverthorne is rumored to be. This feature -- which Intel is likely to emphasize at ISSCC -- allows two instructions to be issued at a time and should give Silverthorne a performance advantage over the C7, which can issue only one instruction at a time.If these rumored characteristics of Silverthorne are confirmed next week, the stage will be set for an unexpectedly close contest between Intel and&#160;Via&#39;s upcoming low-power Isaiah processors, which are also designed for small, portable computers.Tiny by comparison to Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, Via has nevertheless managed to carve out a comfortable niche selling the inexpensive, low-power C7. Beset by a dying third-party chipset business, Via hopes to become a mainstream processor supplier with its upcoming Isaiah processors, which the company unveiled last week.Unlike the C7 and Silverthorne, Isaiah uses a superscalar, out-of-order processor architecture. This architecture, which is used in high-end chips from Intel and AMD, generally offers better performance than an in-order design and is akin to a factory equipped with multiple assembly lines capable of processing different operations at the time.The performance of Isaiah is further enhanced by being superscalar, or having the ability to process multiple instructions during every clock cycle.Centaur, the Via subsidiary that handles processor design for the company, is confident that Isaiah will outperform Silverthorne, even though an accurate comparison of both chips won&#39;t be possible until the two processors can be benchmarked and assessed by independent observers.Nevertheless, Isaiah looks good on paper. Via chips based on the new architecture will offer 1MB of L2 cache and support a front-side bus running at speeds up to 1.3GHz. By comparison, the chip that Intel will reveal next week has 512KB of cache and a 533MHz front-side bus.But the ISSCC abstract raises as many questions as it appears to answer. For example, it doesn&#39;t specify how many cores the new Intel chip will use and gives no indication for how fast these cores will run.Silverthorne, and arelated processor called Diamondville, are widely expected to be available in single-core and dual-core versions. They are also expected to run at roughly the same clock speeds as the Isaiah chips, will be available in versions running from 400MHz up to 2GHz.&#160;
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An IBM supercomputer still under development has set an unofficial new world speed record during testing, the company announced on Wednesday.
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Details are expected on Tukwila, the next-generation 64-bit quad-core CPU, at a chip conference this week.
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MOFFETT FIELD, Calif.--Even as Silicon Graphics trumpeted on Tuesday a new speed record with its Columbia supercomputer built for NASA, CNET News.
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IBM has assembled a 16,000-processor version of its BlueGene/L supercomputer, which on Sept. 16 edged out the Earth Simulator, built by IBM rival NEC, as the most powerful supercomputer on the planet.
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The IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer is currently being assembled for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Livermore plans to buy a unit four times the current supercomputerâs size, according to eBCVG.
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Technology giant IBM will announce today that it has built the world&#39;s most powerful supercomputer, surpassing the performance of a machine in Yokohama, Japan.
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NEC&#160;is selling what it says is the fastest vector supercomputer in the world. The SX-9 is based on a new processor developed by the Tokyo company that boasts a performance of over 100G Flops (floating point operations per second). Up to 16 of the chips can be fitted into a single node and up to 512 nodes can be built together to create what would likely be one of the most powerful computers in the world -- a computer with a theoretical peak processing power of 839T Flops (teraflops).NEC hasn&#39;t benchmarked the machine yet but estimates it would achieve a Linpack score of around 700T Flops, said Hiroshi Takahara, senior director of NEC&#39;s HPC marketing division. That&#39;s more than double the current fastest supercomputer in the world, the&#160;IBM BlueGene/L machine&#160;at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.The new machine, launched Thursday, is much more powerful than NEC&#39;s SX-8R, which it succeeds. To get the same processing power in one SX-9 node would require 13 SX-8R nodes so the new computer takes up 3.9 times less floor space and uses 3.6 times less electricity for the same power.Vector supercomputers are typically used in scientific applications and where large amounts of data needs to be processed. NEC has had some success selling previous systems to meteorological agencies in several nations and to universities, automakers and aerospace laboratories.The SX-9 is aimed at the same type of customer and will be offered on lease with prices starting at &#165;2.98 million ($26,000) per month for the entry-level system. NEC aims to sell about 700 systems over the next three years and already has its first users. Meteo France and Osaka University are among the first customers, said Takahara.With the new supercomputer NEC will again be challenging large U.S. computer makers like IBM and Cray. Five years ago the NEC-built Earth Simulator was ranked the world&#39;s fastest supercomputer but that machine was surpassed by an IBM computer and has dropped to 20th position in the current Top 500 supercomputer ranking.The SX-9, should a large configuration model be built, will have a good chance of restoring NEC&#39;s name back into the top positions of the influential ranking.The Japanese government is pushing to get the country back on top of the supercomputer ranking. It has awarded contracts to NEC, Fujitsu, and Hitachi&#160;for the design and construction of a 10P Flops (petaflops) supercomputer that is expected to be the world&#39;s fastest when it is completed in 2012.The machine will be built in Kobe in western Japan and operated by public research institute Riken. It will be mixed architecture with NEC and Hitachi designing the vector side and Fujitsu the scalar side. A budget of about &#165;115 billion ($1 billion) has been earmarked for the project.
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Lower electrical power consumption,  not just greater data processing oomph, will help a new class  of desktop supercomputers unveiled on Monday turn conventional  industry logic on its head, its designers say.
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A chip the size of a fingernail and capable of more than a trillion calculations per second is unveiled by Intel.
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Kyoto University in Japan has ordered an AMD Opteron-based supercomputer that&#39;s not only powerful but achieves considerable energy savings over its current machine.The cluster will consist of 416 of Fujitsu&#39;s HX600 high-performance computers. Each of those machines is based on four quad-core Opteron processors so a total of 1,664 processors and 6,656 Opteron cores will be busy inside the machine, running applications such as scientific calculations, genomic information processing, computer graphics, and large archive searches.Alongside the main cluster will sit a symmetric multiprocessing cluster consisting of seven Sparc enterprise Unix servers, each based on Sparc64 processors, and with 1TB of memory.The theoretical peak performance of the computer will be 61.2T Flops (floating point operations per second), which would put it somewhere within the top 20 most powerful computers in the world if it was built today.It will be seven times as powerful as the supercomputer it will replace at Kyoto University, and advances in electronics in the last few years mean it will consume the same amount of power or -- put another way -- it will require only 15 percent of the watts per teraflop.Energy consumption is becoming an increasingly important issue as supercomputers become more powerful. Underlining this importance a new ranking of supercomputers was published in 2007 that looks at their energy efficiency.The Green 500 list was developed by two professors at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and the inaugural list put the IBM BlueGene/P system at the Daresbury Laboratory of the Science and Technology Facilities Council in the U.K. at the number one spot. The computer produces 357M Flops per watt.Fujitsu didn&#39;t release precise energy consumption figures for the computer to be installed at Kyoto University but said the entire machine would consume about 600 kilowatts of power. Based on the theoretical peak performance that works out to an energy efficiency of about 102M Flops per watt for the new computer.
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Plans to build one of the most powerful computers in the world at Swansea University are announced.