Crave

IBM's Roadrunner supercomputer was named the fastest supercomputer in the world Wednesday after breaking the petaflop barrier earlier this month.

(Credit: IBM)

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 is equal to a quadrillion, or one thousand trillion, calculations per second).

For perspective, last year's most powerful computer, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's BlueGene/L--also made by IBM--reached 208.6 teraflops. This year that computer ranked No. 2, reaching a max processing speed of 478.2 teraflops.

Fun fact: the fastest supercomputer in the world--used to monitor the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile--is really just a PlayStation 3 on steroids. Roadrunner is based on the IBM QS22 blades, which are built using advanced versions of the Cell processor in Sony's PS3. It also runs using x86 chips from Advanced Micro Devices, making it the world's first hybrid supercomputer.

In total, Roadrunner takes up 278 refrigerator-size server racks, and connects 6,562 dual-core AMD Opteron and 12,240 Cell chips.

IBM, which continues its dominance of supercomputing, makes 210 of the 500 systems, including 5 of the top 10. Hewlett-Packard is close behind, however. HP makes 183 of the fastest computers, including the No. 8 fastest system known as EKA, located in Computational Research Laboratories' data center in Pune, India.

Rounding out the top 10 is Sun Microsystem's Ranger at No. 4, Cray's Jaguar at No. 5, SGI's Encanto at No. 7, and SGI's Altix at No. 10.

On the processor side, Intel dominates the high-end market with 75 percent of all systems on the list and 90 percent of the quad-core based systems that were ranked.

Supercomputing, which pits the highest-end machines against challenges such as forecasting the global climate in coming decades or finding oil reservoirs underground, is a fast-changing field. The Top500 list once again had the most turnover compared with the preceding list, according to the researchers who compile it.

The main measurement used in compiling the list is the Linpack measurement, which puts each system through its paces by having to solve a dense system of linear equations.

The Top500 acknowledges that Linpack isn't a complete test of system performance, but it's a way to test for performance on a similar problem across each system. The need for a more complete benchmarking system has been under discussion for several years.

Some additional interesting statistics about the June 2008 list:

* Quad-core processors are used in just over half of the systems.

* The bulk of the systems (208 of the 500) contain between 2,049 and 4,096 processors. That's more than double the systems that used that amount just six months ago.

* Four of the top five computers (Nos. 1, 2, 3, and 5) are located in U.S. Department of Energy labs.

* The U.S. continues to be home to the most computing power in the world. Just over half of the systems (257) are located in the U.S. The U.K. is next with 53, followed by Germany with 46, France with 34, Japan with 22, and China with 12.

After "not specified," the most popular application area for these superfast computers is finance (15.2 percent of the list), followed by research (10 percent), geophysics (9.8 percent), information service (6.2 percent), and service (5.2 percent).

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."

The space shuttle Atlantis

(Credit: NASA)

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 six months to complete on a PC could be done in 1 hour by the Pleiades system, according to an Intel spokesman. Or, put another way, it's analogous to a 6-hour cross-country flight taking just 1 second.

For NASA, the benefits of the initiative are far more than just theoretical: Its predecessor, Project Columbia, allowed engineers to simulate emergencies in time to avoid space shuttle disasters. The partners say there is a green element to Pleiades as well, a goal to design new aircraft that are 70 percent more fuel-efficient than today's models and make only a fraction of the noise.

Could either of these Rubik's Cube prodigies solve the cube in 26 moves? Leyan Lo talks strategy with Shotaro Makisumi at a competition in January 2006.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

Editors' note: This blog initially misspelled the name of a record holder for solving a Rubik's Cube. He is Leyan Lo.

Clearly, I've been doing something wrong.

Since the early 1980s, when I got my first Rubik's Cube, I've never been able to solve it. Oh, sure, I got one side done, and maybe even two. Or, I could break the thing open and put it back together in its original, solved position.

But now, according to the BBC, a supercomputer has determined that a Rubik's Cube is solvable in less than 26 moves, regardless of the starting position. So, boy, don't I feel dumb?

It turns out, thanks to research done by Northeastern University graduate students Daniel Kunkle and Gene Cooperman that that's all it takes to solve one of the famous toys. Duh.

Yet, I wonder: Could the computer that proved this beat the likes of Leyan Lo, who early last year set the world's record of 11.13 seconds? I sort of doubt it. After all, have you ever seen a supercomputer try to turn a Rubik's Cube?

(Credit: SlashGear)

We have a love-hate relationship with that ultimate object of masculine obsession, the remote control. On one hand, it's risen to a deified status; on the other, we're sick and tired of having so many of them hiding under every cushion in the house.

Yes, we've tried all kinds of universal models, including the very first version of that brick-like Sony remote whose size was matched only by its price. The best part, of course, is that it was so complicated we never learned how to use it. So as tempting as they may sound, we can't help but be skeptical about uber-remotes like the latest one from Philips.

The "Pronto NX PowerLite" is so sophisticated that, at first glance, we thought it was a media player. And in a way, it is: With a VGA interface that organizes entertainment into activities on dynamic Web pages, there's control of not only audio and visual sources but a built-in Escient Fireball music server and Lutron RadioRa lighting control with complete on-screen feedback," SlashGear says. We'll take their word for it.

If all that weren't enough to scare us to death (and it is), we're terrified by the price: $1,836. It's almost enough to make a potato leave his couch.

Which machine started the computer revolution? Some say the ABC at Iowa State was the first computer, but it never got used in a practical way. Others credit Eniac, which wasn't technically first but got the public and government excited about computing.

It's hard to underestimate the influence of Colossus, however. The British-built programmable system at Bletchley Park, England, helped crack the secret codes of the Third Reich and speed the end of World War II.

An early supercomputer gets a do-over

(Credit: Our lads in England)

The MK 1 Colossus was built in 1943 and used 1,500 vacuum tubes to calculate. By June 1944, subsequent Colossus machines using 2,000 valves were cracking German high-command codes to pave the way for D-Day. It wasn't, however, used to crack Enigma, which we posted on earlier, but later, more complex machines. (With all the WWII memorabilia, you'd think you're on the History Channel web site.)

The British government dismantled it at the end of the war to prevent any Cold War enemy from discovering such advanced technology.

Pictured here is the nearly rebuilt Colossus. A group of enthusiasts has been working on it for nearly a decade. Completion is on track for the summer.