Inside The World's Most Advanced Computer

Junky191 writes: "Just came across an informational page for the Earth Simulator computer, which provides nice graphics of the layout of the machine and its support structure, as well as details about exactly what types of problems it solves. Fascinating for the engineering problems tackled- how would you organize a 5,120 processor system capable of 40Tflops, and of course don't forget about the 10TB of shared memory." Take note -- donour writes: "well, the new list of supercomputer rankings is up today. I have to say that the Earth Simulator is quite impressive, from both a performance and architectural standpoint."

Comments

Mandatory remark....

[Dark Lord Seth]

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these !

We already know the answer

[saphena]

42

Do they have the way out?

[littleRedFriend]

Come on give it try and install windows on it. Ooops it went just down from 40 teraflops to effectively 1 (the other 39 is probably used for IE).

Yes but does it run Microsoft Word ??

[derekb]

Sorry had to ask..

Seriously though, the 40 TFLOPS is a peak value. On well-written-code, I wonder how fast it's capable of versus the number 2 in a similar comparison.

Saying 40 TFLOPS peak is still too much like 'Hey my 2.2 GHz Intel beats your 1.2 GHz AMD'. While it is fast, is it really that accurate?

So...

[StoatBringer]

Can they play Quake III on it at lunchtime?

And the answer is....

[TibbonZero]

42!!!!