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Blue Gene/L Tops Its Own Supercomputer Record

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the even-faster dept.

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."

5 of 238 comments (clear)

  1. hmmm by jigjigga · · Score: 5, Insightful

    lets put folding@home (http://folding.stanford.edu/) on that mother!

    1. Re:hmmm by VENONA · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yeah, right. That's very sensitive of you, I'm sure.

      We don't do chemical or biological warfare. All we have is nuclear weapons. So how do we respond, if and when some nutcase state hits us with a nuclear, biological, or chemical attack? Harsh language? Throw some nicely-folded proteins?

      Personally, I prefer that we have some assurance that our nukes will work if we ever need them.

      You can make any sort of argument you'd care to about our messed up foreign policy. I'd probably agree with quite a bit of it. But I still want our stockpiles to work if we ever need them.

      It's a harsh world. Sensitivity and political correctness will only take you so far in dealing with it.

      --
      What you do with a computer does not constitute the whole of computing.
    2. Re:hmmm by Silverstrike · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Because, when you're in agony dying of radiation poisoning, its really going to make your day a lot better to be assured that somewhere else in the world another person, equally as removed from the political context of the nuclear conflict as you are, will be in just as much agony as you are.

      Now, just maybe, the presence of these weapons can be called a deterant, so its possible that possessing them is a necessary evil. However, to be quite honest, if we ever "need" them -- I really do hope they fail to work.

  2. Re:compiler? by Aardpig · · Score: 4, Insightful

    On something like this, they would probably be programming in High Performance Fortran or Fortran w/ OpenMP -- or some similar dialect that supports massively parallel execution. I'm sure IBM develop an in-house compiler for the language.

    --
    Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
  3. Re:Notice that performance had increased per cpu.. by mj_1903 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    That probably only means that they have optimised the architecture over time as would be expected. Things like improved resource management, a slimmer kernel for each CPU, a better compiler, etc. can easily make up for that small performance gain.