Blue Gene/L tops own supercomputing record

No_Style · Mar 23, 2005, 11:18 PM

BM's Blue Gene/L supercomputer has doubled its own performance record by doubling in size; the machine has now performed 135.5 trillion calculations per second, the Department of Energy said Wednesday.

The system, which is in the process of being installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, already topped a list of the 500 fastest supercomputers last November with a sustained performance of 70.7 trillion calculations.

The latest performance increase was achieved by doubling the number of racks in the system to 32. If the design continues on this path, the final machine with 64 racks will perform at about 270 teraflops later this year.

Each rack contains 1,024 processors. Each processor, a special variant of IBM's Power family, has dual-processing engines called cores. For running the basic performance test used to rank the top 500 computers (a test known as Linpack), each core can perform calculation work, but in many tasks one of the cores will be devoted to communications.

Blue Gene began in 2000 as a research project to build a system that could perform 1 quadrillion calculations per second--a petaflop--but IBM is trying to make a business out of the machine. It's begun selling the Blue Gene/L machines for about $2 million per rack and is renting out access to one of its own machines.
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Read More/Source: C|Net Tech News

Mar 23, 2005, 11:18 PM	#1
No_Style Styleless Wonder Join Date: Jun 2002 Location: Ottawa, Ontario Posts: 6,034 Rep Power: 0	Blue Gene/L tops own supercomputing record BM's Blue Gene/L supercomputer has doubled its own performance record by doubling in size; the machine has now performed 135.5 trillion calculations per second, the Department of Energy said Wednesday. The system, which is in the process of being installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, already topped a list of the 500 fastest supercomputers last November with a sustained performance of 70.7 trillion calculations. The latest performance increase was achieved by doubling the number of racks in the system to 32. If the design continues on this path, the final machine with 64 racks will perform at about 270 teraflops later this year. Each rack contains 1,024 processors. Each processor, a special variant of IBM's Power family, has dual-processing engines called cores. For running the basic performance test used to rank the top 500 computers (a test known as Linpack), each core can perform calculation work, but in many tasks one of the cores will be devoted to communications. Blue Gene began in 2000 as a research project to build a system that could perform 1 quadrillion calculations per second--a petaflop--but IBM is trying to make a business out of the machine. It's begun selling the Blue Gene/L machines for about $2 million per rack and is renting out access to one of its own machines. _______________ Read More/Source: C\|Net Tech News __________________ "The Best Style Is No Style" Specifications Here