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."

Comments

Re:Cool, what are they using it for?

[circletimessquare]

peace is not a static state of being. peace is a balanced state of tension between armed foes. war is a disruption in this equilibrium that is then restored. the goal of maintaining peace is to not have any sudden shocks to the status quo

you will never, ever, have a world where peace is simply a static state of being that requires no armed maintenance. why? human nature is why

show me a place where everyone is unarmed and peaceful, and i'll show you a warlord's pillaging grounds

sorry, but this is reality. stop asking for things that don't exist, and never will, as long as human beings are human beings

Re:Built by Fujitsu

[afidel]

Huh?
The K Computer was built by Fujitsu, and contains more than 80,000 2GHz SPARC64 VIIIfx CPUs, each with eight cores, to deliver a total of more than 640,000 processing cores.

That said I'm fairly surprised that it managed to be the 4th highest efficiency system, the SPARC64 isn't really known for being a hugely efficient and the low density of FLOPS/chip would normally mean it needs more support infrastructure further lowering the efficiency. Obviously the guys at Fujitsu have managed to do some great system engineering since Rmax is so close to Rpeak, kuddo's to them for making an awesome system around an ok chip!