In post-Soviet Russia, massive supercomputer programs you. Recently, Russia’s Moscow State University contracted with high-performance computing company T-Platforms to create a ten petaflop cluster that’ll be operational in 2013. The computer would fall just short of the fastest supercomputer on Earth (the Japanese K Computer, which is rated 140% at 10.51 petaflops) and will incorporate a mixture of different node types to achieve the ten petaflops. T-Platforms will reportedly build the nodes from Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge Xeon processors and NVIDIA’s next-generation Kepler GPU coprocessors, and Intel’s Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture could also be included if it’s available during construction. The reason for the project? Unknown officially, but we’re guessing it’s just another reason for Putin to rip his shirt off and celebrate.

Top 5 supercomputers are more power hungry than ever. As expected, Japans K Computer has extended its lead in the prestigious Top500 Supercomputer list. The updated K system now has 705,024 processing cores, delivers 10.5 PFlops and consumes about 12.7 MW. For the first time, the list also includes a supercomputer that integrates a Chinese processor architecture. However, that pride comes with a huge price to pay, which is the bill.

The current Top500 list now ranks four Asian systems among the five fastest supercomputers in the world. NUDT YH MPP follows the K Computer with a performance of 2.6 PFlops. A 1.8 PFlops computer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory is in third place, followed by a Dawning TC3600 system in China (1.3 PFlops) and a HP ProLiant SL390s supercomputer (1.2 PFlops) at Tokyo’s GSIC Center. Despite greater power efficiencies in microprocessors, the overall power consumption is expanding at a rapid pace: K Computer consumes 12.7MW. The five fastest supercomputers are estimated at a consumption of 27.3 MW, up from 14.8 MW just three years ago.

The November 2011 list also includes, for the first time, a computer that uses China’s Shenwei SW1600 CPU. Clocked at 975 MHz, the processor has 16 cores and debuts in a system installed at the National Supercomputing Center in Jinan. The system is ranked at position 14.

SOURCE via TOP500

Fujitsu, sweaty palmed from the construction of the K supercomputer, swore the colossal machine would manage a speed of ten petaflops by the year 2012. The effort has paid off handsomely: the hangar-sized machine has a top speed of 10.51. If you wanted to duplicate that setup at home, you’d only need 864 racks, 88,128 processors and enough cash in your back pocket to front an annual electricity bill of $10 million a year. The company will be spilling all at November’s SC11 conference in Seattle, where the K will cement its position as the fastest computer in the world. One last thing — we have a hunch that this machine can just about play Crysis.

SOURCE via Nikkeibp

China has already, however briefly, sat atop the Top500 list of supercomputers, but that was using silicon designed by American companies like Intel and NVIDIA. The country’s latest contestant though, is sure to be a much bigger point of national pride. The Sunway BlueLight MPP, which was installed at the National Supercomputer Center in Jinan this September, is powered by 8,700 ShenWei SW1600 CPUs — the homegrown chips that come out of Shanghai. The Sunway’s one petaflop performance isn’t enough to make it the new king of the hill, but it should get it into the top 20. More impressively, the machine only consumes about one megawatt of electricity — roughly a quarter of the 2.5 petaflop Tianhe-1A. Now it’s up to researchers to crank these ShenWei cores up to a 11 and make a run at that 50 petaflop Cray.

SOURCE via New York Times

Tuesday Nvidia said that Oak Ridge National Laboratory has chosen Tesla GPUs to power a new Cray XK6 supercomputer called “Titan” for the U.S. Department of Energy’s open science computing facility located in Tennessee.

Titan will integrate 299,088 AMD Opteron processing cores (18,688 16-core CPUs) as well as 7000 to 18,000 Nvidia Kepler GPUs. The system, which is scheduled to completed in late 2012, will also integrate 600 TB of memory. ORNL said that Titan will be ready for users sometime in 2013.

Nvidia said that the new computing beast has the potential to deliver over 20 petaflops of peak performance, more than two times faster and three times more energy efficient than today’s fastest supercomputer, the K computer located in Japan. Steve Scott, the CTO of Nvidia’s Tesla business unit, added that Titan will be ten times more powerful than the current Jaguar machine. 85-percent of the computing power will come from the Tegra chips while the other 15-percent will be handled by conventional AMD CPUs.

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According to the document, which stretches over 649 pages, IBM describes a BlueGene/Q system that is based on 524,288 processing nodes with 16-core PowerPC A2 processors that are able to handle 64 threads each. The system would include almost 8.4 million processing cores that are organized in 512 racks. The targeted performance is a peak of 107 PFlop/s.

The BlueGene/Q Sequoia supercomputer IBM is currently building for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will use about 1.6 million A2 processing cores in 96 racks. The patent claims that each processing node will consume about 30 watts of power, which puts the 107 PFlop/s system at only 15.7 MW. That is rather impressive for a system with more than 8 million CPU cores.

The patent suggests that IBM has big plans with BlueGene/Q and especially its 5D torus network that connects the computing nodes among each other. There was no information when such a 100+ PFlop/s system could become reality. Sequoia is scheduled to go online in 2012 with a peak performance of about 20 PFlop/s.

SOURCE via Conceivablytech

IBM’s ambitious Blue Waters supercomputer project apparently drowned in complex technology and a flood of unexpected costs.

IBM, which was contracted by National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, is said to have abandoned the project as the “technology […] was more complex and required significantly increased financial and technical support by IBM beyond its original expectations.”

A press release indicated that the two parties could not find a mutual plan that would accommodate the changed environment. As a result, the NCSA is getting its money back. IBM will also get back all equipment that had been already delivered.

Blue Waters was originally planned to become NCSA’s new flagship supercomputer with a peak performance of 10 PFlops that should have been delivered by at least 300,000 IBM Power7 cores. The original core architecture promised a quad-CPU module, which holds four 8-core Power7 processors. Each processor was promised to deliver a peak performance of 256 GFlops and each module about 1 TFlops. Other specs included more than 1 PB of memory, more than 25 PB of storage, 500 PB of archival storage and more than 100 Gbps of bandwidth. The NCSA said that it has not abandoned the project, but is looking for other ways to realize its next supercomputer.

SOURCE via NCSA

Remember the K — the Fujitsu supercomputer that promised to do a whopping ten petaflops by the year 2012? Well, it hasn’t reached that threshold just yet, but according to the latest Top 500 supercomputer list, it’s still faster than any other machine on Earth.

In fact, the top-ranked beast is more powerful than the next five supercomputers combined, consumes enough electricity to power about 10,000 homes for a full year, and is capable of churning out about 8.2 quadrillion calculations per second — three times as many as what runner-up (and former number-one) Tianhe-1A can process.

Today’s announcement marks the first time since 2004 that a Japanese creation sits atop Top500.org’s rankings, but Fujitsu isn’t exactly resting on its laurels. Before deploying it next year, engineers at the Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science are aiming to add about 100,000 cores to the K’s collection of 548,352, which would provide it with even more computational muscle, and likely spell doom for all of humanity.

SOURCE via New York Times

Roll the drum boys and girls. We have yet another winner from the East. They might not have made it in the FIFA World Cup, but they’ve the world’s fastest supercomputer yo! China just passed the US and the world with their latest Tianhe-1A, fully operational at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin, scored 2.507 petaflops as measured by the LINPACK benchmark. That moves it past Cray’s 2.3 petaflops Jaguar located at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee. Tianhe-1A achieved the record using 7,168 NVIDIA Tesla M2050 GPUs and 14,336 Intel Xeon CPUs consuming 4.04 megawatts. That’s still quite some steps to 10 petaflops, but we’ll see how the Tianhe-1A scores in next week’s Top500 supercomputers list.

SOURCE via Nvidia

Petaflop, what does it mean to you? Yes, it does sound a lot as it’s the next step after teraflop. Does 10 petaflops sounds a lot to you? Because Fujitsu has done it with the upcoming “K” supercomputer. It’s able to crunch through 10 quadrillion operations every time you blink your eye. Now, compare that to the current champ of processing farms, Cray’s Jaguar, which can handle only (only!) 1.75 petaflops of workload and you’ll know that we’re talking about a seminal leap in performance. Japan’s Riken Research Institute is the fortunate addressee on the crates of ultrafast SPARC64 VIIIfx processors that Fujitsu is now shipping out and the current plan is to have everything up and running by 2012. In total, there’ll be 80,000 CPUs, each possessing 8 cores running at 2.2GHz, which will be housed within 800 racks. So yes, there’ll be a machine somewhere on the Japanese isle with 640,000 processing cores at its disposal. Sadly you’ll never have the chance to play Crysis with this.

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SOURCE via CNET