IBM Sets Supercomputer Speed Record

T.Hobbes writes "IBM's BlueGene/L has set a new speed record at 36.01 TFlops, beating the Earth Simulator's 35.86 TFlops, according to internal IBM testing. 'This is notable because of the fixation everyone has had on the Earth Simulator,' said Dave Turek, I.B.M.'s vice president for the high-performance computing division. The AP story is here; the NY Times' story is here."

Comments

Tecord?

[el_benito]

A new tecord?!? That's timpossible! But more seriously, does anyone know if there's an impartial 3rd party that ever confirms these measurements? I'm all for improving technology, but how do they verify their "tecords"?

36 TFlops ?

[MadX]

I wonder if that is sustained ??
I know that when the Mac G5 Cluster was developed they claimed tremendous speed, but when the sustained rate was calculated, it turned out to be much lower ...

Off the shelf configuration

[erick99]

From the article:

Unlike the more specialized architecture of the Japanese supercomputer, IBM's BlueGene/L uses a derivative of commercially available off-the-shelf processors. It also uses an unusually large number of them. The resulting computer is smaller and cooler than other supercomputers, reducing its running costs, said Hirschfeld. He did not have a dollar figure for how much lower Blue Gene's costs will be than other supercomputers.

This is the most interesting part of the article to me. Makers of supercomputers are going to go back and forth for the speed record. However, holding the speed record with off the shelf components seems like a separate achievement in and of itself. The article did mention, however, that the IBM system is not as capable as other supercomputers.

The most interesting part:

[onetrueking]

From the NYTime article:

"The new system is notable because it packs its computing power much more densely than other large-scale computing systems. BlueGene/L is one-hundredth the physical size of the Earth Simulator and consumes one twenty-eighth the power per computation, the company said."

1/100th the size and 1/28th the power. Now if that isn't a beautiful thing, I don't know what is.

Smart machines

[fionbio]

I've heard that the neural network of human brain has calculation speed of 4.4 TFLOPS. How soon these machines will start to THINK? Seems like what we need now is just more storage capacity and some well-written "thinking" software...

Re:Smart machines

[Doesn't_Comment_Code]

You're getting into some pretty deep issues now. Can a computer ever think? How would we know if it was thinking? At what point does the computer start thinking instead of just following instructions. No matter how complex it's instructions are or how fast it executes them, isn't it still just following instructions? What about us? Are we just following instructions?

Timeout-- my head hurts.

Which brings me to my next point. If computer ever could think, it would eventually start to think about how it thinks... And then it would overheat or explode.

Va. Tech cluster not on current Top 500 list

[Troy Baer]

The peak of VTs System X cluster was about 17 Tflops, and the sustained rate was just over 10 (which rendered it the third place on the Top500 list).

Except that it's not on the most recent Top 500 list anywhere.

Remember how Va. Tech replaced all 1100 G5 nodes with G5 XServes a few months ago? Well, when you do something like that, you have to rerun and resubmit the benchmark. Va. Tech were not able to get the machine back together soon enough to rerun the benchmark in time to make the last list; there's even a big caveat about it on the Top 500 home page.

(It's also not clear that the original version of the Va. Tech machine ever did anything other than run that benchmark, but that's another matter.)

--Troy