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Japan's Petaflop Supercomputer
slashthedot writes "Japan has built the fastest supercomputer in the world. While the BlueGene/L contains 130,000 processors, Japan has managed to create the first Petaflop supercomputer, called MDGrape-3, with just 4808 chips, and it cost just $9 million to develop."
If this petaflop supercomputer really only costs $9 million and only occupies the space of a large walk-in closet, why don't they mass-produce it and sell it. No, not to individuals but to corporations and governments. Folding@Home and Seti@Home could suddenly be like, sorry guys we don't need you anymore - we got something better. Having hundreds of copies of this super computer could quickly solve problems across the globe that much slower supercomputers are currently having trouble with!
... and in the DRM, bind them.
The Cell processor can do ~200 GFLOPS - not IEEE quality FLOPS however, however they're 'good enough single precision FLOPs' for it's target uses. This is probably why this new supercomputer won't get into the Top500 list, because it's very specialised and thus probably nowhere near as good at IEEE conformant calculations.
The Cell processor is not running at 200GHz. There's this concept called 'parallelisation', it's how your graphics card can do dozens, if not hundreds, of operations per clock cycle. In Cell's case it can do 8 (number of SPUs) * 4 (128-bit registers, SIMD) * 2 (units) = 64 SP FLOPS per clock cycle, and that's not including the PPU which has VMX128 and an FPU itself.
However make the Cell processor calculate IEEE conformant FLOPS, and it gets a double precision score of around 20GFLOPS. Still good though.
The above was from memory, details may vary, figures are roughly correct, YMMV, etc.
This article here from Riken themselves has some more technical details:
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http://mdgrape.gsc.riken.jp/modules/tinyd0/index.