supercomputer

"All depends on your perspective," recalled an amused Fran Allen, not at all regretting her participation in a now-storied mid-1950s supercomputer project popularly known as "Stretch."

Even though IBM only built nine of the machines, Stretch left behind a legacy that remains a source of pride to the participants who were present at its creation.

"A lot of what went into that effort was later helpful to the rest of the industry," Allen said with the sort of … 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

IBM says it has developed a way to use one of its supercomputers to improve diagnosis and treatment of the widespread bone disease osteoporosis.

IBM Zurich Research Laboratory and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (also known as ETH Zurich) utilized an IBM supercomputer to develop a method of early diagnosis that they say trumps the current approach to measuring bone mass density, the computer company announced Monday.

According to the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases, the current most widely recognized bone mass density test is conducted by a dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry, or DXA. However, … Read more

Windows rules on the desktop, but if you want serious performance, there's only one choice: Linux.

As The 451 Group captures in a great write-up of the most recent Top500 report of the world's fastest supercomputers, Linux is the default choice for 85 percent of the world's fastest computers. Windows? It can barely scrape together 1 percent market share.

The world's fastest supercomputer, built by IBM, uses the xCAT distributed computing management and provisioning tool, created by Egan Ford (a friend and IBM's supercomputer guru). The good news for Microsoft? It's open source. Microsoft … Read more

Updated 3:12 p.m. to correct the number of the highest ranking Windows cluster

While Windows is ubiquitous on the desktop and well represented in the server racks, until recently it has been nearly absent from the world's largest supercomputers.

Starting several years ago, though, Microsoft made a concerted effort at this part of the market, creating a separate version of Windows solely for computing clusters.

The first big fruits of that effort were evidenced in this year's top 500 list of the world's biggest supercomputers. Five of those on the list were Windows clusters, including … 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

NASA, Intel, and SGI announced today that they are collaborating on a groundbreaking initiative that promises to vastly improve performance of the space agency's supercomputer operations, "enabling them to push the limits of scientific discovery."

Under a joint project dubbed "Pleiades," the three partners plan to develop a modeling and simulation system of unprecedented speed and capacity in the nation's space program. Specifically, they hope to produce computational performance of 1 petaflop (a quadrillion operations per second) by 2009 and 10 petaflops by 2012.

What does that mean, exactly? A task that would take … Read more

Purdue University on Monday plans to install a new supercomputer on its campus in a single day, in an effort it's calling an "electronic barn-raising."

Approximately 200 employees will help build the machine, which will be the size of a semi trailer and is expected to have a peak performance of more than 60 teraflops, which means it would be able to perform more than 60 trillion operations in one second, according to a Purdue press release.

Once it's completed, Purdue's supercomputer still won't top the list of the 500 fastest supercomputers, though the … Read more

Yahoo announced Monday that it has joined forces with the Pune, India-based Computational Research Laboratories (CRL) in order to support research in cloud computing, a way to outsource hardware and software to service providers rather than host it locally. Under the terms of the agreement, researchers will be able to use the EKA, a supercomputer owned by CRL that contains 28 terabytes of memory, 14,400 processors, 140 terabytes of disks, and a peak performance of 180 trillion calculations per second.

According to CRL, EKA is the world's fourth fastest supercomputer.

"We are excited to partner with Yahoo … Read more