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NEC Strikes Back With SX-8 Supercomputer

Posted by timothy on from the my-honor-student-can-beat-up-your-dad dept.

News for nerds writes "It was just 3 weeks ago that we learned IBM's BlueGene/L with 36.01 TFlops edged out NEC's Earth Simulator, but today NEC announces a new SX-8 supercomputer with a peak processing performance of 65 TFlops (press release). It may be available in the U.S. as Cray's OEM like SX-6."

4 of 192 comments (clear)

  1. It's like by Moby+Cock · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This is like an arms race of yesteryear. The Germans and the Brits with their battleships, the Americans and Soviets with there nukes, the Yankees and Red Sox with payroll. Except this race is way cooler and will likely pay off in a much more productive way.

    1. Re:It's like by Timesprout · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Except this race is way cooler and will likely pay off in a much more productive way.

      Yes because this sort of computing power holds no attraction to the military for weapon modeling purposes or to the untouchables running echelon type programs.

      --
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  2. 65 TFlop is only an estimate by foobar3149 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The 65 TFlop for the SX-8 is only an estimate while the 36 TFlop for BlueGene/L was real performance. So it is not certain that SX-8 will be faster than Blue Gene/L

    1. Re:65 TFlop is only an estimate by flaming-opus · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's probably a pretty good estimate, as this is just a clock speed bump and packaging update to the sx-6 (earth simulator).

      An equally important criticism is that they've only announced the POSSIBILITY of building a 65TF system. No one has actually ordered one. The cray X1 can scale up to 50TF if fully populated. The X1E scales up to 150TF. This is of no great consequence, as the largest one in production is only 10TF. Yes they could build a really big sx-8, but it cost $200M to build the earth simulator, probably something similar to build this thing.

      There are a lot of computers that are really cool - on paper.