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."

Comments

World's Fastest Supercomputer! Wow.

[cableshaft]

Considering the almost exponential rate that technology increases, this computer won't be any faster than a personal computer in 6-8 years, and will undoubtably have its rank supplanted within probably 4 years. I fail to see why this is all that interesting, especially since I know its status will be ousted sometime in the near future, barring some sort of crazy worldwide nuclear or biochemical war.

It's not quite as "prestigious" as the guy with the world's longest fingernails or anything, that's all I'm trying to say.

Re:good stuff

[Anonymous Coward]

Not every problem can be solved by "divide and conquer" clusters.

Please elaborate, since you seem to know this stuff.

Re:Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash

[sean23007]

You don't seem to understand what government means.

The government has spent billions fighting a war overseas; when is it your turn to go fight?