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

oblig.

[mevets]

640K cores is enough for anyone.

Re:Imagine

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I'm pretty sure that we've moved all our beowulf clusters to a cloud that runs linux in soviet russia...

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.

Re:Supercomputers seem to evolve faster than PCs

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I'm not sure that you are being entirely fair to the desktops:

On the one hand, since a vast percentage of desktops are sold to budget-conscious users with fairly defined needs, the bottom end of the desktop market moves fairly sluggishly(of course, the bottom end of 'supercomputers' also moves more sluggishly; but nobody bothers to talk about the "250,000th fastest supercomputer!!"); but the top end has been moving at a reasonably steady clip.

Back in mid 2007, a Core2 quad was Pretty Serious Stuff, with maybe a Geforce 8800 or 9800 and 4-8 gigs of RAM if you were hardcore like that.

That will still go head to head with a contemporary budget to midrange box; but if you spent the same money today that you would have had to spend on that, you could be talking a high-end i7, a markedly more powerful graphics card(or 3 of them), and two or three times the RAM. Plus, the now-reasonably-cost-effective-even-when-large-enough-to-be-useful SSD that will have driven your I/O numbers through the roof.

Apathy and diminshing returns keep the desktop market boring; but if those are no object, you can still go nuts.

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!