New Top 500 Supercomputer List

geaux and other readers let us know that the new Top 500 Supercomputer list is out. The top two both break the Petaflops barrier: LANL's IBM "RoadRunner" and ORNL's Cray XT5 "Jaguar." (Contrary to our discussion a few days back, IBM's last-minute upgrade of RoadRunner salvaged the top spot for Big Blue. Kind of like bidding on eBay.) The top six all run in excess of 400 Teraflops. HP has more systems in the top 500 than IBM, reversing the order of the previous list. Both Intel and AMD issued press releases crowing over their wins, and both are correct — AMD highlights its presence in 7 of the top 10, while Intel boasts that 379 of the top 500 use their chips.

Comments

Wily Coyote comments

[MosesJones]

Wily Coyote certified Genius was said Monday to be disappointed that the Road Runner had yet again managed to elude him but denied that the Road Runner had demonstrated more brains than him.

"Although it may appear that the Road Runner is smarter due to the fact that I have fallen off cliffs, blown myself up and run into brick walls in fact I am significantly more intelligent and am an ACME top engineer"

IBM's Media Minder for Road Runner passed on a single comment

"MIP MIP"

Re:AES

[Iamthecheese]

A device that could check a billion billion (1018) AES keys per second would require about 3*10^51 years to exhaust the 256-bit key space.(Wikipedia)

A round can now be done with 16 table lookups and 12 32-bit exclusive-or operations, followed by four 32-bit exclusive-or operations in the AddRoundKey step.

(Wikipedia)

Assuming 14 rounds for your 256 bit encryption thats 42 operations per round. At a trillion operations/second you get 1*10^12/42(love that number)=23,809,523,809, call it 24 billion rounds per second. Divide by a billion billion to try to match Wikipedia's number: 1/24,000,000,000= 41*10^-10. We can add those nine zeros straight over to get 41/3*10^61 years.


Did I do that right?