Slashdot Mirror
Software to Make Blue Gene Top 200 Teraflops
An anonymous reader writes "New Scientist has a story about the most intensive computer program ever created. It runs on IBM's big beast, Blue Gene/L, at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and carries out 207.3 teraflops (trillion cacluations per second). The program, called Qbox, performs very complex quantum calculations to simulate the behaviour of thousands of atoms in three dimensions. Wow."
C64 takes a totally different approach to high performance computing. Most supercomputer architectures are built around a moderate to large number of very, very fast (and power-hungry) processors. For example, Big Mac at Virgina Tech had something like 10,000 pentium 4 class processors. Cyclops64 is have an *enormous* number of processors (on the order of a million), but running only at 500 mhz, making them much easier to cool). The idea is to give the programmer more thread units than he knows what to do with, running very close together at a low level.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton