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Japanese Supercomputer K Hits 10.51 Petaflops
coondoggie writes "The Japanese supercomputer ranked #1 on the Top 500 fastest supercomputers broke its own record this week by hitting 10 quadrillion calculations per second (10.51 petaflops), according to its operators, Fujitsu and Riken.
The supercomputer 'K' consists of 864 racks, comprising a total of 88,128 interconnected CPUs and has a theoretical calculation speed of 11.28 petaflops, the companies said."
The supercomputer 'K' consists of 864 racks, comprising a total of 88,128 interconnected CPUs and has a theoretical calculation speed of 11.28 petaflops, the companies said."
42
if your life is such a big joke then why should I care?
consists of 864 racks, comprising a total of 88,128 interconnected CPUs
Where goes the border between a supercomputer and a cluster?
Communication time. Trying to run a massively parallelized plasma physics simulation on a mere cluster is essentially a waste of time. The scaling is terrible.
Spock: "Computer. This is a class one priority directive. Compute, to the last digit, the value of Pi."
Computer: "The answer is 10, base Pi."
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
... a Beowulf cluster of those!
1 base Pi == 1 base 10 == 1 base 2 == 1 base N
Technically, a cluster can be a supercomputer if it is tightly-coupled, which basically means high bandwidth, low latency and as little overlap on the fabric as possible. (ie: 88,128 PCs linked via the Internet could be considered a grid but it would not be considered a supercomputer. The same number of PCs in a server room using a hundred or so switches, with each switch stuffed to the gills, would be considered a regular cluster. The same PCs in the same room using high-end switches linked as a Fat Tree, Butterfly or - ideally - a hypercube topology would be considered a supercomputer. The same PCs in the Cloud would be considered a torrential downpour.)
The problem is ultimately, as Plasmaphysiker says, communication time. From a technical standpoint you can just as easily say "a supercomputer is any computer that can mimic or better a vector processor's overall performance for the same compute power". Ok, maybe not as easily as it's longer to say, but it comes to the same thing.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_computer
IBM has the Sequoia system coming on line in 2012 and it is also targeted at the 20 Petaflop range. It will be significantly more power efficient at 3000 Mflops/watt, three times lower then the K system
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Sequoia
Why is Snark Required?
A car analogy? Or how may libraries of congress / football fields?
Seriously I doubt 10.51 petaflops means anything to anyone except a small coterie of supercomputer nerds.
That's why I read Slashdot.
How many bitcoins per hour is that?
"Well kids, you tried your best, and you failed. The lesson is, never try." -Homer Simpson
Even if booting off the fastest SSD available, booting into any version of Windows will take at least 20 seconds. Dropping in a CPU with infinity processing power will not reduce this. That's because during the POST process, there are wait states timed against the RTC conducting all sorts of hardware polling to enure everything connected is alive. It's not a bug, it's a feature. A standardized process. You can optimize BIOS settings however by turning off unused hardware, features, and SATA ports to decrease POST times however. But again, at minimum, POST times will never be instant for an IBM based PC. Also, Windows performs similar hardware polling against the RTC at bootup as well.
It should be noted that an Apple MacBook with an SSD boots almost instantly. But that should come to no surprise because Apple owns both the hardware and OS. They can optimize as they wish.
Life is not for the lazy.
Actual specs : 68500 Sparc64s, each with 8 cores. So every core can put away between 5 and 10 double-precision calculations every single cycle?