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supercomputers

roadrunner

Roadrunner Military Supercomputer Sets Processing Record

Roadrunner, the IBM supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, manages 1.026 quadrillion calculations per seconds, also known as a Petaflop. Twice as fast as IBM's Blue Gene/L, the previous World's Fastest, the Roadrunner—also from the House of IBM, will be used, once classified, to solve military problems—such as making sure our proud nation's nuclear weapons will continue to work correctly as they age. Until classification, however, it will be used for important scientific problems, such as how I can get more shoes in my closet climate change. More »

nvidia

FASTRA Desktop Supercomputer Built With 4 Nvidia 9800 GX2 Graphics Cards

Looking at new computational methods for tomography—a technique used by medical scanners to create 3D images—University of Antwerp researchers have built a budget supercomputer using four Nvidia 9800 GX2 graphics cards (a total of eight GPUs with 1,024 stream processors) as its super-calculating soul, which "perform as fast as 350 modern CPU cores." More »

semiconductors

IBM Unleashes Photonic Supercomputer... On a Chip

Modern supercomputers are still at least 100 times faster than the crappy laptop you bought a week ago, and electrons are to blame. Today, IBM introduced a way to speed up the action on regular silicon chips by replacing the wiring with pulses of light, a technology called—what else?—silicon photonics. This method works for longer stretches requiring communication between cores, but it doesn't have a major impact in very tight spaces, so copper can still be used. This all may sound familiar, as it's essentially a teeny tiny version of today's fiberoptic networks. Now that you're kicking yourself about that laptop purchase, here's the good news: photonics won't be marketable on chips for another decade. [InfoWorld]

supercomputers

NEC's SX-9 is the World's Most Powerful Supercomputer

NEC has thrown down the world's most powerful supercomputer, called the SX-9, which is intended for pioneering scientific research. The beast of a machine can pull out an astonishing 839 trillion floating point operations / second (839 teraflops). The computing giant will go on display in Reno, Nevada, later this month. Why Nevada? More »

pcs

SiCortex Supercomputer Can be Powered by Bicycles

Here's a common predicament: You've got a supercomputer handy and you have some complex mathematical equations you need crunched. The problem is, there's no power source available! That's what you get for setting up your supercomputer in the desert, you idiot. Well, that won't be a problem much longer. That's because SiCortex has developed a supercomputer that can be powered by bicycles; 8 to 10 of them, to be exact. Finally! More »

world's fastest

IBM to Build $200 Million Petaflop Supercomputer

According to some leaked government documents, IBM is working on building a monstrous $200 million petaflop supercomputer. Commissioned by the National Science Foundation, it would be the fastest computer in the world, the first to break the petaflop barrier. For you folks keeping track at home, a petaflop is a thousand trillion mathematical operations per second. Yeah, that's fast. More »