NEC launches fastest vector supercomputer
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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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Chipmaker's speedy Pentium 4 gets even faster.
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IBM Corp. plans to announce today that it has built the world&#39;s fastest supercomputer at one of its facilities in Rochester, Minn.
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NEW YORK - IBM is claiming unofficial bragging rights as owner of the world&#39;s fastest supercomputer. IBM says its still-unfinished &quot;BlueGene System&quot; can sustain speeds of 36 teraflops.
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The U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is getting ready to do some serious number crunching at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The NNSA recently selected IBM to construct the world's first supercomputer using Cell Broadband Engine (B.E.) processors that can perform a mind-boggling 1,000 trillion calculations per second, or one petaflop.
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IBM is expected to announce today that it has built a supercomputer that could qualify as the world's fastest machine.
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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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(InfoWorld) - The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) chose IBMÂ to build a new supercomputer for its Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, IBM announced Wednesday. Named "Roadrunner," the new machine comes with a price tag of $35 million, the amount allotted by the U.S. Congress to the DOE's National Nuclear Safety Administration (NNSA) for its purchase. One potential use for Roadrunner is to monitor and maintain the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile. DOE officials said they would monitor the computer's development to see if it meets the criteria to perform that task. The DOE has used supercomputers to keep an eye on the health and readiness of the U.S.'s nuclear weapons, in lieu of actual underground nuclear tests. Roadrunner will run Red Hat's version 4.3 Linux operating system, and will be built entirely with commercially available hardware running two different types of processors, IBM said. The company will use IBM x3755 systems, with Advanced Micro Devices' Opteron processor, alongside IBM BladeCenter H systems with Cell processors.
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IBM Corp. claimed unofficial bragging rights Tuesday as owner of the world's fastest supercomputer. For three years running, the fastest supercomputer has been NEC's Earth Simulator in Japan.
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Researchers have built a prototype of a 'desktop supercomputer' that runs 100 times faster than today's PCs.
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&quot;The fact that non-US vendor like NEC had the fastest computer was seen as a big challenge for US computer industry,&quot; said Horst Simon, director of the supercomputing centre at Lawrence Berkeley Labs in California.
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JAPANESE TIN maker NEC has released a mass produced supercomputer computer which it claims knocks the socks off Big Blue&#39;s Blue Gene/L.
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Massively parallel, 64-bit POWER-based processor to debut at ISSCC
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IBM Corp. plans to announce today that it has built the world's fastest supercomputer at one of its facilities in Rochester, Minn., wresting the title from a system in Japan.
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NEC has unveiled its latest supercomputer, which is almost twice as fast as the BlueGene/L machine rolled out by IBM in September.
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TOKYO - NEC Corp. has begun marketing the SX-8, its latest entry in the supercomputer sweepstakes. The vector supercomputer features peak processing performance of 65 teraflops, which according to NEC tops rival IBM Corp.
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Computer giant IBM announced this week that it has developed the world&#39;s fastest computer, putting it back on top after a Japanese supercomputer claimed the title some two years ago.