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Cell-based "Roadrunner" Tops Elusive Petaflop Mark
prunedude writes "The NY times is reporting that an American military supercomputer, assembled from components originally designed for video game machines, is more than twice as fast as the previous fastest supercomputer, the I.B.M. BlueGene/L. To put the performance of the machine in perspective, Thomas P. D'Agostino, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said that if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day."
Before it does weapons simulations, it will first work on some scientific problems, like model testing to predict climate change.
After it's done with that (I wonder how they will determine what done is...), it will go classified and do nuke simulations.
If one looks at http://www.top500.org/ list and compare the CPU frequencies of the top supercomputers - all BlueGene CPUs were running at less than a GHz. And it seemed those low power cores were key to HPC (high performance computing). Cell and opteron - both run at multiple GHz and (presumably consume more power). IBM still has next generation of BlueGene/Q in works and is also for +Petaflop computation.
Military taking the lead on computing as usual. Why is the military so much more progressive (with practical results) than any other institution of government?
Are you kidding?
I don't respond to AC's.
This is actually based on Cell 2 or as IBM marketing likes to say it "Cell eXtreme"!
Cell 1 (the Playstation chip) didn't have the double precision floating performance to achieve the petaflop mark; Cell 2 is far better on that front.
What? You want a sig?