Blue Gene/L Tops Its Own Supercomputer Record

DIY News writes "Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and IBM unveiled the Blue Gene/L supercomputer Thursday and announced it's broken its own record again for the world's fastest supercomputer. The 65,536-processor machine can sustain 280.6 teraflops. That's the top end of the range IBM forecast and more than twice the previous Blue Gene/L record of 136.8 teraflops, set when only half the machine was installed."

Comments

And these supercomputers are supposed to be super

[TechnoGuyRob]

According to Wikipedia:

A supercomputer is a computer that leads the world in terms of processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation, at the time of its introduction.

Hmm...to be "more specific":

In the 1970s most supercomputers were dedicated to running a vector processor, and many of the newer players developed their own such processors at lower price points to enter the market. The early and mid-1980s saw machines with a modest number of vector processors working in parallel become the standard. Typical numbers of processors were in the range 4-16. In the later 1980s and 1990s, attention turned from vector processors to massive parallel processing systems with thousands of "ordinary" CPUs; some being off the shelf units and others being custom designs. Today, parallel designs are based on "off the shelf" RISC microprocessors, such as the PowerPC or PA-RISC, and most modern supercomputers are now highly-tuned computer clusters using commodity processors combined with custom interconnects.

And even more...

Supercomputers are used for highly calculation-intensive tasks such as weather forecasting, climate research (including research into global warming), molecular modeling (computing the structures and properties of chemical compounds, biological macromolecules, polymers, and crystals), physical simulations (such as simulation of airplanes in wind tunnels, simulation of the detonation of nuclear weapons, and research into nuclear fusion), cryptanalysis, and the like. Military and scientific agencies are heavy users.

(1) Who needs weather forecasting computers when we have Ron Burgundy. (2) Screw global warming. How about we figure out how to move to a better planet and get the space program going. (3) Molecular modeling? I was doing that with clay when I was 3. (4) Nifty...physical simulations...you mean like...simulating what an orgy with all 6 billion people on the earth would look like? (5) With quantum cryptography coming up cryptanalysis is going to be useless. Way to make a supercomputer that's going to be obsolete tomorrow. Honestly, these things could barely beat Gary Kasparov. Why don't you spend your time on something more useful, IBM engineers.

Re:hmmm

[VENONA]

No worries; we have The Shrub!

http://politicalhumor.about.com/library/blbushisms .htm

You have to love the poll for favorite Bushism:
1 'Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream.'
2 'I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family.'
3 'They misunderestimated me.'
4 'Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?'

Ah well, this is getting way off-topic, and I have to go look at a server.