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World's Fastest Supercomputer To Be Built At ORNL

Posted by timothy on from the right-near-dollywood dept.

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."

5 of 230 comments (clear)

  1. Qualifier by andy666 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    As usual, there should be a qualifier as to what is meant by fastest. According to their definition they are, but not according to NEC's, for example.

  2. Hmm by LaserLyte · · Score: 5, Funny

    > ...capable of sustaining 50 trillion calculations per second.

    Hmm...I wonder if I could borrow it for a few days to give my dnet stats a boost :D

  3. Re:Wow... by FenwayFrank · · Score: 5, Funny

    It's so fast, the blue screen shifts to red!

  4. They better hurry ... by realSpiderman · · Score: 5, Interesting
    ... or this is going to beat them hard.

    Still a whole year until they have a full machine, but the 512-way prototype reached 1.4 TFlops (LinPack). The complete machine will have 128 times the nodes and 50% higher frequency. So even with pessimistic scalability, this will be more than twice as fast.

  5. as a former DOE employee by bsDaemon · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I worked in Instrumention and Control for the Free Electron Laser project at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. We also host the CEBAF (Concentrated Electron Beam Accelerator Facility), which is a huge ass particle accelerator.
    the DOE does a lot of basic research in nuclear physics, quantam physics, et cetera. the FEL was used to galvanize power rods for VPCO (now Dominion Power) and made them last 3 times as long. Some William & Mary people use it for doing protein research, splicing molecules and stuff.
    The DOE does a lot of very useful things that need high amounts of computing power, not just simulating nuclear bombs (although Oak Ridge does taht sort of stuff, as does Los Alamos). We only had a lame Beowulf cluster at TJNAF. I wish we would have had something like this beast.
    I want to know how it stacks up to the Earth Simulator.