Super Supercomputer
Faster than your average supercomputer
Kevin Lynch
Issue date: 10/29/04 Section: Sci-Tech
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Virginia Tech announced earlier this week that its System X supercomputer received a recent upgrade. The new system incorporates 1100 Apple XServe G5 2.3 GHz dual processor cluster nodes up from Power Mac G5 towers. After the upgrade, the system now operates 12.25 teraflops, or roughly 12 trillion calculations per second, making this the fastest university owned supercomputer. The university spent $600,000 on the upgrades, adding to the original cost of $5.2 million.
Virginia Tech's glory, however, was dwarfed by the unveiling of an even faster supercomputer on Wednesday located at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. NASA, in conjunction with the high-end server manufactururer Silicon Graphics Inc., released details of Columbia, a $50 million Linux-based supercomputer comprised of 20 servers containing a total of 10,240 Intel Itanium 2 64-bit processors. The system set a remarkable 42.7 teraflops using only 16 out of 20 servers. When run at full power, the supercomputer was able to operate at 51.9 teraflops, dwarfing the recently announced BlueGene/L by IBM running at 36.0 teraflops, and the long-time champion, Earth Simulator at 35.9 teraflops created by the Japanese computing giant NEC.
The news of these systems comes just in time for the unveiling of the Top500 list which details the most powerful computer systems twice a year. The systems are based off of performance results of running the Linpack Benchmark, a series of tests that measure a computer's floating point rate of execution by solving a dense system of linear equations. The Top500 list will be released November 8 at SC2004, the world's leading conference on high performance computing, in Pittsburg.
Virginia Tech's glory, however, was dwarfed by the unveiling of an even faster supercomputer on Wednesday located at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. NASA, in conjunction with the high-end server manufactururer Silicon Graphics Inc., released details of Columbia, a $50 million Linux-based supercomputer comprised of 20 servers containing a total of 10,240 Intel Itanium 2 64-bit processors. The system set a remarkable 42.7 teraflops using only 16 out of 20 servers. When run at full power, the supercomputer was able to operate at 51.9 teraflops, dwarfing the recently announced BlueGene/L by IBM running at 36.0 teraflops, and the long-time champion, Earth Simulator at 35.9 teraflops created by the Japanese computing giant NEC.
The news of these systems comes just in time for the unveiling of the Top500 list which details the most powerful computer systems twice a year. The systems are based off of performance results of running the Linpack Benchmark, a series of tests that measure a computer's floating point rate of execution by solving a dense system of linear equations. The Top500 list will be released November 8 at SC2004, the world's leading conference on high performance computing, in Pittsburg.
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