Japan's 8-petaflop K Computer Is Fastest On Earth

Stoobalou writes "An eight-petaflop Japanese supercomputer has grabbed the title of fastest computer on earth in the new Top 500 Supercomputing List to be officially unveiled at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg today. The K Computer is based at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan, and smashes the previous supercomputing records with a processing power of more than 8 petaflop/s (quadrillion calculations per second) — three times that of its nearest rival."

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Re:Supercomputers seem to evolve faster than PCs

[jpapon]

Two things, your 4 year old desktop is nowhere near as fast as the new i7s. It just seems that way because you're not doing number crunching on it; for normal applications, you'd probably see a bigger boost by switching to a SSD then a new CPU. Second, these supercomputers are massively parallel, so while the procs themselves do get faster, the real increase in speed seen comes from adding lots more cores.