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Supercomputers Corroborate Einstein's e=mc2 After 103 Years
Posted by Jesus Diaz at 9:56 AM on November 22, 2008
Believe it or not, but it has taken 103 years and the combined power of various of the world's top supercomputers to prove Eintein's biggest equation right, resolving e=mc2 at the scale of sub-atomic particles. The feat has been achieved by a team of French, German, and Hungarian physicists led by Laurent Lellouch at the Centre for Theoretical Physics in France, and has finally answered a question that has puzzled scientists for decades: The Mysterious Case of the Disappearing Atom Mass!
It's like a geek soap opera. Just last week, Cray bragged that their updated 
Pumping out a sustained 1.64 quadrillion mathematical calculations per second (1.64 petaflops) after a recent technological overhaul, the Cray XT Jaguar is now the world's latest fastest supercomputer (huge disclaimer coming) for non-classified research. And once you see what's under the hood, you'll know why.
Well, the LHC may be out of commission 
Why should UNIX nerds (God love 'em) have all the fun? Cray and Microsoft announced today a partnership to produce the CX1, a $US60,000 (on the top end) supercomputer that runs the forthcoming Windows HPC Server 2008--MS's answer to the high-performance *nix server systems run by most heavy servers. So now you can crunch your lab's genome splicing data while you play Crysis on another blade, with plenty of processing power to spare.
Recently green-lit to be built at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IBM's future Blue Waters supercomputer is peta'd all over. It'll have up to 2-petaflops processing speed, more than a petabyte of memory and a 10 petabyte disk storage system. It'll also have more than 200,000 processor cores, and cost around US$208 million, which is even more 000s. All this power is going to be used for proper hard science like simulating the Sun's coronal mass ejections, studying 
Named for microbiology pioneer Anton van Leeuwenhoek, Anton is currently being built with 512 highly specialised processors. These are clocked at just 400MHz, and the machine has modest memory, but its architecture lets it process problems in a massively-parallel way. Ultimately, that'll offer a performance boost of 1000x over current complex molecular simulations. And that's great news: these bits of math are how drug design works. It's different to processing done by existing supercomputers like BlueGene/L in that it will look at molecular behaviour over a longer interval. That means scientists could discover new biological processes. "If you can do 1,000 times longer, real proteins come into play" as team leader David Shaw puts it. Anton should be in operation later this year. [
What you see here is not a simple array of LCD displays. This is NASA's hyperwall-2, the world's highest resolution visualisation system. At 23 by 10 feet wide, hyperwall-2 uses 128 screens driven by 128 graphic processing units with a total of 1,024 processor cores capable of displaying quarter billion-pixel graphics. That's 74 teraflops of power--the number-crunching capacity of six hundred last-generation consoles-- accessing 475 terabytes of dat, what scientists and Led Zeppelin technically classify as "a whooping whole lotta love." Instead of gaming, however, this massive display will be used for more mundane things like, you know, black holes or saving lives.
Roadrunner, the IBM supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, manages 1.026 quadrillion calculations per seconds, also known as a Petaflop. Twice as fast as IBM's Blue Gene/L, the previous World's Fastest, the Roadrunner—also from the House of IBM, will be used, once classified, to solve military problems—such as making sure our proud nation's nuclear weapons will continue to work correctly as they age. Until classification, however, it will be used for important scientific problems, such as 
