cray

The Cray XT5 supercomputer known as "Jaguar" has finally clawed its way to the title of fastest computer in the world.

Sitting back at No. 2 on the Top500 list of supercomputers for more than a year, Jaguar overtook IBM's "Roadrunner" according to the twice-yearly list that will be unveiled Tuesday at the SC09 Conference in Portland, Ore.

Jaguar beat out the competition by showing it can process 1.75 petaflop/s, or quadrillions of floating point operations per second, according to the Top500 Linpack benchmark. IBM's Roadrunner was pushed back to No. 2 … Read more

Despite the Jaguar nipping at its heels, Roadrunner continues to speed past the supercomputing pack.

That's according to the twice yearly Top500 list of the fastest supercomputers in the world, which is to be announced Tuesday morning at the 2009 International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany. The list is released in June and November every year.

The IBM supercomputer housed at the Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory, known as Roadrunner, maintains the lead it grabbed a year ago. The computer can process 1.105 petaflop/s, or quadrillions of floating point operations per second, according to … Read more

Microsoft's entry into the supercomputing market took another step Tuesday as high-end system leader Cray announced plans for its first machine running the Windows HPC Server operating system.

Cray announced the CX1 supercomputer, which will run HPC Server 2008 and have list prices between $25,000 and $60,000--prices which make it the company's most affordable system ever.

"Cray sees Microsoft Windows becoming an increasingly important force in the HPC market," Cray Senior VP Ian Miller said in a statement. "With the Cray CX1 high productivity system and Windows HPC Server 2008, we're bringing … Read more

OAK RIDGE, Tenn.--If you want to see someone's face light up, try talking to a scientist in a supercomputer lab about their machines.

I had that experience last week when, as the last major stop on Road Trip 2008, I visited the National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) at the Oak Ridge National Lab to get a quick look at what is certainly one of the top facilities of its kind in the world.

My host was computational scientist Bronson Messer, and during a whirlwind tour of the center, he showed me several of the world's most … Read more

Good news for green tech: The fastest supercomputer in the world is also one of the most energy efficient. That's according to the Top500 supercomputers list, to be released Wednesday at the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany.

Twice yearly, the list measures the 500 most powerful computer systems available commercially. This year, the 31st time the list has been put together, the honor of top supercomputer goes to IBM's Roadrunner, which is housed at the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory. It's the first system to reach 1.026 petaflops (1 petaflop … Read more

Supercomputer expert Cray and Intel have entered a multiyear agreement on high-performance computing, a deal that seems to leave rival Advanced Micro Devices in the lurch.

Under the alliance, Intel will provide chips and silicon expertise to Cray, which in turn will design supercomputers and servers around Intel's chips. Cray, one of the oldest names in supercomputing, has been on a comeback trail in recent years by producing computers based around AMD's Opteron chip.

AMD, however, has had problems following on the success of the first generations of Opteron, a server chip that came out in 2003. A … Read more

I had a great time over the weekend at the 10th Vintage Computer Festival, which took place in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.

In addition to the exhibits of vintage computers--including the largest collection of Radio Shack Pocket Computers I've ever seen--and the marketplace, where I managed to avoid buying any slide rules, Vectrix video games, or Cray supercomputer circuit boards--there were several notable presentations.

On Saturday, Tim McNerney spoke about his work to reimplement the Intel 4004 microprocessor, which led to a 130x-scale working model of the chip composed of individual transistors on a large … Read more

Supercomputers need super, or at least novel, debugging.

To meet that need, Cray has just agreed to license Australian software start-up Guardsoft's "relative" debugging technology for use in its new DARPA-funded supercomputer.

Relative debugging allows programmers to track bugs that creep into software as it is modified, or ported from one system to another, according to Guardsoft. It does this by comparing the execution of a suspect program with a clean version. This differs from traditional debugging in two ways: First, it compares program variables not with the user's expectations but with another program known to … Read more

Citigroup analyst Glen Yeung has begun suspecting that Advanced Micro Devices' quad-core "Barcelona" processor is late, but the chipmaker said Tuesday that it remains on schedule. However, shipments to supercomputer maker Cray of a close Barcelona relative code-named Budapest have slipped.

There is "no delay" for Barcelona, spokesman Phil Hughes said Tuesday. The chips, and some systems using the chips, will be available in the third quarter, he said.

Barcelona is a strategically important chip for AMD, as it tries to regain market share lost to Intel's newer Core 2-based Xeon server processors, the dual-core … Read more