Then it surpassed IBM's 1.04 petaflop/s supercomputer, achieving its 1.74 quadrillion floating points operation according to the Top500 Linpack benchmark. I mean, it was probably some extra CPUs coming online, but I'm pretty sure the main reason for the boost was that drawing.

Roadrunner took a dip from June's 2009 test, which gave it 1.105 petaflops. That's probably Wile E. Coyote's fault. My recommendation to IBM: Paint flames on it to win the #1 spot back.

This is the current top ten:

1. Jaguar, Cray, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA (1.75 petaflop/s)
2. Roadrunner, IBM, Los Alamos National Laboratory, USA (1.04 petaflop/s)
3. Kraken XT5, Cray, National Institute for Computational Sciences, USA (832 teraflop/s)
4. JUGENE, IBM, Forschungszentrum Juelich, Germany (825.5 teraflop/s)
5. Tianhe-1, NUDT, National SuperComputer Center, Tianjin, China (563.1 teraflop/s)
6. Pleiades, SGI, NASA Ames Research Center, USA (544.3 teraflop/s)
7. BlueGeneL, IBM, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, USA (478.2 teraflop/s)
8. BlueGene/P, IBM, Argonne National Laboratory, USA (458.61 teraflop/s)
9. Ranger, Sun, Texas Advanced Computing Center, USA (433.20 teraflop/s)
10. Red Sky, Sun, Sandia National Laboratories, USA (423.9 teraflop/s)

[Top500 Supercomputers via Cnet]

Name: Cray-1
Year created: 1976
Creator: Cray Research, Inc.
Cost: $5 million to $10 million
Memory: 4MW semiconductor
Speed: 160 MFLOPS

Building supercomputers was a dream, an aspiration, and a life's pursuit for Seymour Cray, and his work on the computers that bore his name was the culmination of work he had done for the U.S. Navy, for CDC [Control Data Corporation], and finally for his namesake company. When Cray left CDC in 1972, after his work on the 6600, 7600, and minimally the 8600, he took much of the supercomputer fire with him.

While Cray's departure from CDC wasn't overly dramatic, his impact on supercomputing was. Cray artfully designed computers so that each part worked to efficiently speed up the whole, and he usually didn't rely on the newest experimental components, preferring instead to tweak existing technologies for maximum performance. For instance, the Cray-1 was the first Cray machine to use integrated circuits, despite their having been on the market for about a decade. At 160 MFLOPS, the Cray-1 was the fastest machine at the time, and despite what seemed like only a niche market for expensive superfast machines, Cray Research sold more than a hundred of them.

Form and size were always concerns for Cray, as far back as his days developing the CDC 160, which was built into an ordinary desk. There was also a big concern with the heat that could be generated by so many parts being packaged so tightly together, so Cray's designs typically involved unique cooling solutions, whether it be Freon on the Cray-1, or Fluorinert, in which Cray-2's circuit boards were immersed.

Core Memory is a photographic exploration of the Computer History Museum's collection, highlighting some of the most interesting pieces in the history of computers. These excerpts were used with permission of the publisher. Special thanks to Fiona!

The photos in the book were taken by Mark Richards, whose work has appeared in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Fortune, Smithsonian, Life and BusinessWeek. The eye-candy is accompanied by descriptions of each artifact to cover the characteristics and background of each object, written by John Alderman who has covered the culture of high-tech lifestyle since 1993, notably for Mondo 2000, HotWired and Wired News. A foreword is provided by the Computer History Museum's Senior Curator Dag Spicer.

Or go see the real things at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.

Gizmodo '79 is a week-long celebration of gadgets and geekdom 30 years ago, as the analog age gave way to the digital, and most of our favorite toys were just being born.

Both the IBM and Cray systems break the petaflop processing barrier according to Top500 measurements (1.45 petaflops vs 1.38 petaflops, respectively). Heck, even IBM admitted to us that the two computers "run neck and neck." But there's a huge difference between them.

The Roadrunner uses roughly half the power of the Jaguar XT.

It assembles 12,960 IBM PowerXCell 8i Cell Broadband Engine processors and an additional 6,948 AMD Opteron Dual-Core processors. The AMD equipment handles "basic" functions while the IBM chips handle the intense number crunching. (Read all about the Roadrunner here.)

Seeing as the Cray XT5 uses 45,000 quad-core AMD Opteron processors to get the same job done, you've gotta be at least a little impressed. [Top500]

The system is powered by 45,000 quad-core AMD Opteron processors that take advantage of 362 terabytes of memory. This and other underlaying architecture allows processors to chew on 284 gigabytes of data per second with its impressive I/O bandwidth, which has apparently been a major bottleneck in supercomputers of yesteryear. Information is stored on 750 terabytes of hard drives.

The Cray XT Jaguar can be found at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory where it will create scientific breakthroughs during the day, and succumb to Crysis at night. [ORNL and EurkeAlert]

The "cool stuff" will take about three weeks to get up and running, with the more visual demos coming at the tail-end of that. The one benchmark they currently have is that it hits 768 Gigaflops, which they hope to bump over 800 with some fine-tuning. Moving from Nvidia's Quadro 4600 to their newer Tesla cards should give the system a jolt as well, since they're explicitly designed for parallel computing applications, like what the CX1 is designed for.

The CX1 can hold up to eight computing blades—though the storage and visual blade each take up two slots, so the model they were showing had four computing blades, and one of each. While each blade is highly customizable, the cheapest one they had configured was about $4,000, and a fully spec'd out CX1 goes for about $85,000 (slightly higher than they originally announced). While it's not actually designed for gaming at all, for that much I'd want it to burn Crysis directly into my brain. [Cray]

You almost missed it there right next to the desk, didn't you? When it's not badly Photoshopped in a Cray brochure, the CX1 packs 16 Intel Xeon procs, either dual- or quad-core (you choose), with 8 supercomputing nodes that can accommodate 64GB of memory per node. Internal storage tops out at 4TB. You can custom-configure and purchase one today, on ranges from $25,000 to $6000.

Microsoft and Cray Team Up to Drive High Productivity Computing Into the Mainstream
Cray CX1 Supercomputer With Windows HPC Server 2008 and Intel Xeon Processors Starts at $25,000 and Provides "Ease-of-Everything" for New Users of HPC
SEATTLE, WA and REDMOND, WA, Sep 16, 2008 (MARKET WIRE via COMTEX News Network) — Supercomputer leader Cray Inc. (NASDAQ: CRAY) and Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT) today introduced the new Cray CX1 supercomputer pre-installed with Windows HPC Server 2008. With U.S. list prices starting at $25,000 to over $60,000, "ease-of-everything" features and the ability to fit into standard office environments and workflows, the new product reflects Microsoft and Cray's shared goal to drive high productivity computing farther into the mainstream in a broad array of markets including financial services, aerospace, automotive, petroleum, life sciences, government, academic and digital media.

Studies released by the Council on Competitiveness and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) found that nearly all large firms using HPC consider it indispensable for their ability to compete and survive, but smaller companies, as well as workgroups and departments in larger firms, have been hampered by the cost of HPC systems and a lack of access to in-house experts to help them use these systems.

The Cray CX1 supercomputer was designed from the ground up to address these barriers. It is the most affordable supercomputer ever offered by Cray and is designed to be easy to purchase, deploy, operate and upgrade. Purpose-built for offices, laboratories and university departments, the Cray CX1 is the world's highest-performing computer that uses standard office power.

The Cray CX1 product incorporates up to 8 nodes and 16 Intel Xeon processors, either dual or quad core; delivers up to 64 gigabytes of memory per node; and provides up to 4 terabytes of internal storage. Systems can be configured with a mix of compute, storage and visualization blades to meet customers' individual requirements. The quiet, deskside supercomputer features Windows HPC Server 2008 and interoperates with Linux. A three-year warranty with next-day, on-site Cray-certified support is standard.

"Windows HPC Server 2008, in combination with the Cray CX1 supercomputer, will provide outstanding sustained performance on applications," said Vince Mendillo, director, HPC at Microsoft Corp. "This combined solution will enable companies in various sectors to unify their Windows desktop and server workflows. Many Microsoft financial services customers, for example, want to unify back-office modeling and simulation with the work of front-office trading desks."

"IDC research shows that HPC has been one of the highest-growth IT markets during the past five years and the segment for HPC systems priced below $100,000 is headed for continued growth," said Earl Joseph, IDC's HPC program vice president. "The Cray HPC brand name and experience, combined with Microsoft's strategy of extending the familiar Windows environment upward to the server level, gives the Cray CX1 solution strong potential for exploiting the anticipated growth of this market segment."

"Cray sees Microsoft Windows becoming an increasingly important force in the HPC market," said Ian Miller, senior vice president of sales and marketing at Cray. "With the Cray CX1 high productivity system and Windows HPC Server 2008, we're bringing the power of Cray supercomputing to a much wider range of new users with an affordable and adaptable system that provides incredible value and is easy to install, program and use with a broad array of applications from independent software vendors (ISVs)."

The Cray CX1 high productivity system is also the first Cray product to incorporate Intel processors and the first milestone of the unique collaboration Cray and Intel announced in April to develop a range of HPC systems and technologies over the next several years to address various segments of the HPC industry.

"Taking advantage of the energy-efficient performance of the Intel Xeon processor 5400 series, Cray's CX1 system will bring many HPC capabilities to the office that were previously confined to the datacenter, enabling more users to employ supercomputing to help them solve some of their most difficult computational problems," said Richard Dracott, Intel's General Manager of High Performance Computing, "In addition, we continue to collaborate with Cray on developing the supercomputing technologies of the future, aimed at all segments of the HPC market."

Scientists at the Laboratory of Neuro Imaging at UCLA plan to use a Cray CX1 with Microsoft HPC Server 2008 for mathematical modeling and visualization. This will support their development of advanced computational algorithms and scientific approaches for the comprehensive and quantitative mapping of brain structure and function.

"We are very excited about utilizing the Cray CX1 to support our research activities," said Rico Magsipoc, Chief Technology Officer for the Laboratory of Neuro Imaging. "The work that we do in brain research is computationally intensive but will ultimately have a huge impact on our understanding of the relationship between brain structure and function, in both health and disease. Having the power of a Cray supercomputer that is simple and compact is very attractive and necessary, considering the physical constraints we face in our data centers today."

[Cray]

Baker will be up to the challenge, with 24,000 quad-core 2.6GHz AMD Opteron processors. It'll be no slouch with memory, either, where its makers are considering using between 187TB or 400TB of RAM, and have settled for just 11 petabytes of disk space. All this hardware squeezes into a mere 187 cabinets. But can it play Doom?

24,000 quad core Opteron system slated [The Inquirer]