petaflops

Japanese supercomputer first to clear 10 petaflops

The rankings of the 10 fastest machines didn't change at all on today's new version of the Top500 supercomputer list, but the top dog cleared the notable performance hurdle of 10 petaflops.

"Flops" stands for floating-point operations per second and is a measure of how fast a supercomputer can perform mathematical calculations using the Linpack benchmark. The K Computer, at the Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science in Japan, moved up from 8.16 petaflops, the score it used to reach the top of the twice-yearly supercomputer ranking last June, to 10.51 petaflops.

It reached … Read more

Nvidia to power DOE supercomputer, one of the fastest

Oak Ridge National Laboratory will tap Nvidia chips to power what is expected to be one of the world's fastest supercomputers.

Oak Ridge's Titan supercomputer will eventually pack as many as 18,000 Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs) and have the potential to deliver 20 petaflops of peak performance, making it one of the fastest computers in the world.

Last year, Nvidia made a splash when it announced that its chips were powering the Chinese "Tianhe-1A" supercomputer, which, at that time, became the fastest in the world. As of June, the Chinese system was ranked No. 2 in the world … Read more

Intel 50-core chips headed to Texas supercomputer

A University of Texas of supercomputer will tap a future Intel chip that contains more than 50 processor cores--the first instance of Intel supplying this novel technology to a commercial computer.

The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) and University of Texas announced today that they will deploy a 10-Petaflop (or 10,000 trillion operations per second) supercomputer dubbed "Stampede."

When it arrives in early 2013, the supercomputer is expected to be among the world's most powerful computers for scientific and financial applications.

Inside will be an Intel chip design codenamed "Knights Corner," which will house … Read more

Buzz Out Loud 741: 3Gasm

All the iPhone and App Store news you can shake a stick at. Plus, RIM and Palm say they're thrilled about the new iPhone. Huh. Us, too! But it's a delayed, uh, 3Gasm, since the phone won't be coming out until July 11. In other news, Amazon broke itself, the MPAA wants to break your movie recording, and SanDisk kills the TakeTV and Fanfare less than a year after it was born. Listen now: Download today's podcast EPISODE 741

Live blog: Steve Jobs at WWDC 2008 http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-9960064-37.html

What’s good for … Read more

NASA, Intel, SGI launch supercomputer project

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