“With performance almost double that of the Earth Simulator, in Yokohama, Japan, IBM’s Blue Gene/L on Monday was officially ranked first on the Top500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers. IBM built four of the top ten machines on the biannual list,” Robert McMillan reports for IDG News Service. “Blue Gene/L is a 33,000-processor prototype of a much larger $100 million system that will be delivered to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, during the first half of 2005. The system is capable of performing 70.72 trillion calculations per second, making it the first new system to top the list since NEC’s Earth Simulator first appeared in 2002.”
“When fully assembled at Lawrence Livermore, Blue Gene/L will be a 130,000-processor system with an estimated peak performance of 360 teraflops, according to IBM. A teraflop is one trillion calculations per second,” McMillan reports. “In second place on Monday’s Top500 ranking is the 10,240-processor Columbia supercomputer, built by Silicon Graphics (SGI) for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, in Mountain View, California. With a benchmarked performance of 51.87 teraflops, it easily beat out the Earth Simulator, which was measured at 35.86 teraflops.”
“Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University reappeared on the list, finishing in seventh position five months after dropping off the last list, issued in June, because of a hardware upgrade to Apple Computer’s Xserve systems. Virginia Tech’s SuperMac system reported a benchmark of 12.25 teraflops,” McMillan reports.
Full article here.
Making top 10 is sweet news for Apple!
I didn’t see any mention of costs or of price per teraflop.
Wasn’t Big Mac #3 in the last ranking book that it was rated in?
it’s still top ten which is good news! I thought the COLSA machine would be up to but I didn’t find
how do you “upgrade” and lose speed?? what was who smoking??
7th is still good. Are there any windows machines in top 10000. Guess not. LOL
they didn’t upgrade and lose speed. the previous cluster never officially topped 11 tera. the bummer is the cost relationship. Hell, spend a 100 million on G5s and see what kind of cluster you get!
Virginia Poly’s cost 6.5 mil – multiply that by 15, take into account a 22% dropoff at that multiplier, and you still get a 98 million dollar machine at a speed of about 140 tera.
WAKE UP D.O.D. AND NASA!!!! THAT’S TWICE AS FAST FOR THE SAME PRICE!!!
The #4 computer is running on PowerPC970 as well.
Better than Intel chips and Dells
matthew t you sound like ballmer on that old Windows 2.0 Ad.. chill out
Well theres an article recently about Windows releasing their SDK for windows supercomputing but they havent worked out how much they are going to “Sell” (rent) licenses for. Why would anyone pay for Windows on a supercomputer when Linux and Unix already have most of the scientific apps. Just another me 2 from MS. I hope the effort falls flat on its face.
5 of the top 10 are PPC CPUs, quite a change from last year. The Power 4 Chip is the father of the IBM 970 series a.k.a. G5. The Power PC RISC design is just now coming into it’s own and the future is VERY bright- on the desktop and in the cold room.
this is a nice one in place 444
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http://www.top500.org/sublist/System.php?id=7309
G3s are looking good in 1st and 8th spot
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$100 million for Blue Gene/L 130,000-processor peak performance of 360 teraflops
seems like well spent money to me
Is it first in bang for the buck?
Has anyone else who comes to this site had the problem of getting hijacked to a “Mac Dock” vendor site? In the last week, there have been several days when my bookmark to this site would only take me to this other vendor–what the heck is up with that??? (I keyed in the site too-still hijacked on those days.)
Anyone know how to avoid this problem?
Mac User
NICE… the Blue Gene/L machine is built with PowerPC 440GXs. It’s still a great day for PowerPC even though System X didn’t rank as high this year.
sorry mike – one of those days i felt like yelling…
I can dance better than Balmer, by the way. not by much, but hey…
it is still exciting to have System X running in the top 10.
5 of the top 10 are PPC, 8 of the top 15 are PPC, only 3 of the top 15 are Intel. hhhhmmmmm, what is the better chip design?
Where is COLSA?
okcalla, BigMac gained speed, but an bunch of new hundred million$ systems joined the mix this year (mostly IBMs) I would like them to put the prices on the list. not to mention the # of processors per system, all the systems above BigMac have at least TRIPLE the processors! BigMac would easily be #4 if it even had DOUBLE the processers.
but still no mention of the Army’s MACH 5 cluster. anyone have any news on that one?
Mac Dock” hijack…
I havent been “hijacked” since I started using ..
this
Go Apple.
I concurr. haven’t ever been hijacked and rate PithHelmet an essential tool that you never notice is there, but sure do if it isn’t..!
“Go Apple” …I also concurr!
The military clusters are probably classified, but would probably be on the list if they could be.