Spanish supercomputer to begin work in January 2005
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The world's second-most powerful computer is expected to be operational in Spain in January, a senior Spanish minister announced.
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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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Big Blue is set to debut the eServer i5 550, an iSeries machine it created to serve midsize businesses.
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SANTA CLARA, CALIFORNIA - Intel Corp. plans to ship its first Xeon processors based on a new dual-core architecture in 2006, company officials said Tuesday, a disclosure that surprised industry observers who had expected the chips to appear in 2005.
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If you need a supercomputer on your desktop, Orion Multisystems has a machine for you. Aiming at scientists and engineers who need to do serious data crunching, the Santa Clara start-up will
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(InfoWorld) - As Sun Microsystems prepares to demonstrate a new high-performance computer Tuesday at a technology conference in Germany, it hopes that quad-core processors from Advanced Micro DevicesÂ that will power the computer arrive on time to deliver one of the machines to its first customer. Sun is going to introduce its Constellation system at the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, at which other supercomputer makers are gathering and at which a twice-yearly list of the world's Top 500 supercomputers is to be released Wednesday. IBM, whose Blue Gene/L supercomputer wasÂ No. 1 in a November 2006 Top 500 listÂ based on system performance, will introduce what it says is a still faster Blue Gene/P Tuesday. Sun chose the AMD Opteron quad-core chip,Â code-named Barcelona, over rival Intel'sÂ quad-core Xeon 5300 chip, because it believes AMD's will be "the fastest chip on the market this year," said Andreas Bechtolsheim, chief architect and senior vice president of the systems group at Sun. "We are still hopeful that they will deliver the chips on time." Sun also hopes Constellation can be out in time to be considered for the November Top 500 list. AMD's stock was downgraded June 6 by some investment analysts who questioned the chip maker's ability to deliver Barcelona on time. But AMD spokesman Phil Hughes said Monday that "we're still on track" for a Barcelona launch in the third quarter. Constellation is targeting IBM, which held an industry-leading 47.8 percent market share on the earlier Top 500 list, because its Blue Gene line is "the fastest machine out there," Bechtolsheim acknowledged. But Sun's Constellation is built with open industry standard components, such as x64 processors, Sun blade servers, Sun Fire x4500 storage, and open source Solaris or Linux operating system software, while IBM's Blue Gene is built from custom-made components. "Our observation is that industry standard open architecture has caught up with special-purpose computers. That's what we really mean to say here," Bechtolsheim said. Sun believes that building a supercomputer from custom parts takes too much time and costs too much money to build. But building a custom machine may allow IBM to pull further ahead of the rest of the field. IBM claims in a news release that the coming Blue Gene/P has triple the performance of version L, including a potential top processing speed of 3 petaflops (P flops). A petaflop is 1,000 trillion flops (floating-point operations per second), a measure of how many computer calculations can be made in that time. Sun says the Constellation features a total 131,072 processor cores, can operate at up to 1.08 petaflops, has 100TB of memory, and an input-output (I/O) speed (the speed at which data can be moved in and out of the central processing unit) of 3TBps. A terabyte is 1 trillion bytes. The Top 500 supercomputers list, compiled by university researchers in the U.S. and Germany, ranks supercomputer systems that are usually operated in government or university research centers in the U.S., Europe and Asia. Sun is in the process of building a Constellation supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computer Center (TACC) at the University of Texas in Austin. The TACC received a $59 million grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation in 2006 to build the supercomputer.
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Company will manufacture a dual-core PowerPC processor.
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The battle for supercomputing supremacy took a new twist on Tuesday when Japanese manufacturer NEC launched a new generation of computational building blocks that could be laced together to form the most powerful supercomputer in the world.
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The world's fastest commercial supercomputer is launched by the computer giant IBM.
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A Spanish supercomputer built by IBM has captured the world speed record for a machine using standard blade servers.
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The machine began life as a research project in 2000, is presently the world&#39;s fastest supercomputer, and has only four publicly announced customers.
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InfoWorld - Advanced Micro Devices&#160;(AMD) is&#160;getting ready to launch Barcelona, its first quad-core server chip.
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Systems will use 64-bit version of Intel's Xeon processor.
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Big Blue breaks into the quadrillion calculation range with new Blue Gene/P supercomputer.
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Chip maker plans for smaller, faster, less power-hungry processors.
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(InfoWorld) - Advanced Micro DevicesÂ (AMD) said Friday it wouldÂ begin shipping its "Barcelona" quad-core Opteron processorÂ in August, rebutting industry rumors that the chip faced manufacturing problems that could delay it until October. Although AMD has already lined up hardware partners like Sun MicrosystemsÂ to use the chip in high-end servers, some analysts had predicted that a delayed release could cause AMD toÂ lose business to Intel. However, AMD insists it is on schedule to produce both standard and low-wattage SE (special edition) versions of Barcelona, in a range of frequencies up to 2.0GHz. The new Barcelona chips will generate the same amount of heat as current Opteron chips, but improve computing performance by 70 percent for database applications or 40 percent for floating point jobs, Allen said. Future versions of both types will run at even higher speeds, allowing customers to further improve their energy efficiency, said Randy Allen, corporate vice president of AMD's server and workstation division. Intel competes for those same customers today with the dual-core Woodcrest and quad-core Clovertown Xeon processorsÂ launched last year, and plans to up the ante in the fourth quarter of 2007 with quad-core "Harpertown" server chip using smaller, 45-nanometer scale components. AMD will begin shipping Barcelona chips for sale in August, and expects server vendors to ship commercial products using the chip by September. AMD hopes those new servers are popular enough to help reverse a slide in market share and revenue in recent months. The company has posted losses of hundreds of millions of dollars for the past two quarters as it struggles to survive aÂ price war with Intel. Â
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Advanced Micro Devices Inc. hopes to seize a larger share of the server chip market from its rival Intel Corp. on Monday when it launches the Barcelona quad-core processor.