Fastest Commercial Supercomputer To Be Built

Zeus305 writes: "Today NuTec Sciences, Inc. will be announcing its purchase of the world's fastest commercial supercomputer, second overall only to ASCI White. NuTec will use and lease time on the 1,250 clustered IBM servers to analyse genes decoded by the human genome project to try to better understand the causes of diseases like cancer by running month-long algorithms that analyse the relationships between different areas of the genome. This beast will have 2.5 terabytes of RAM and 50 TB of disk space."

Comments

Parallel computing & computer science...

[mwalker]

Isn't this trend towards faster supercomputers being driven by advances in Computer Science, rather than Engineering?

Remember the Cray Y-MP? Used to be the world's fastest computers were designed to be extremely fast CPU's, built as a sphere to shorten contact length and liquid-cooled. Parallel computing was possible then - the problem was that we couldn't break down the problems we wanted to solve into parallel events.

Today's brand of parallel supercomputers exist to solve a different kind of problem - a problem in which the "search space" can be compartmentalized and distributed- like the RSA challenge, fluid dynamics, chess, and -of course- the human genome.

The thing to remember when we read about ever-faster parallel computers is that, for all intents and purposes, when you have to solve a truly sequential problem (what the cray folks would have called a 0% vector-optimized problem) - today's supercomputers usually aren't any faster than the desktop computer you're sitting in front of. Compute the Fibbonaci sequence (without solving it for x) and race your PIII with this computer - and you might win.

Just something I wish they'd point out. We need a better adjective than faster for parallel computers. They're something else. Maybe... wider.

Suggestions?