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World's Fastest Supercomputer To Be Built At ORNL
Homey R writes "As I'll be joining the staff there in a few months, I'm very excited to see that Oak Ridge National Lab has won a competition within the DOE's Office of Science to build the world's fastest supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Lab in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. It will be based on the promising Cray X1 vector architecture. Unlike many of the other DOE machines that have at some point occupied #1 on the Top 500 supercomputer list, this machine will be dedicated exclusively to non-classified scientific research (i.e., not bombs)."
Cowards Anonymous adds that the system "will be funded over two years by federal grants totaling $50 million. The project involves private companies like Cray, IBM, and SGI, and when complete it will be capable of sustaining 50 trillion calculations per second."
How many FPS does it get in Q3? :P
There are some problems that lend themselves to be easily divided between thousands of processing nodes and then combined in a final answer / solution. (easily meant in the way mathematicians use the word, i.e easy means it known to be possible, anyone who's ever written a program using more that 2 threads knows what a nightmare it can be)
...as long as the government is spending my moneyI guess they considered other options before awarding the contract.
...another 1 ton monster that'll be obsolete in two years... Shame really, I must agree. But obsolete sounds a tad too harsh, perhaps not amongst the top 10 most powerfull but still usefull. And in 10 years time, they can incorporate it into the firewall and use it to run spam detection programs. (if the spam traffic keeps increasing at the current pace, it might be sufficient to service say, 5 mailboxes?)
Then there are problems where such approach is not possible and you just need a very fast pipeline, or a big data troughput or whatever.
Sure, I'd love to have one of those things in my house,... I certainly won't my P4 system is making enough noise already and it's more than fast enough for all the simulation I've run on it in the last three years.
a beowulf cluster of these!
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Finally we can have a system that can show the full potential of DOOM 3!!