Supercomputers

Computing

Amazon Built 42nd Fastest Computer In The World Without Trying

2:58AM December 28, 2011 | Sam Biddle

For the past several years, Amazon has been quietly building one of the fastest cloud networks in the history of computers. Except it doesn’t exist in any room — it’s spread across the entire world. Virtual computers are now supercomputers. More »


Science

Can Watson’s Mega-Brain Help Rid The World Of Patent Trolls?

10:20AM December 9, 2011 | Mario Aguilar

IBM’s Watson is most famous for handing Ken Jennings his arse on Jeopardy, but since then the supercomputer’s talents have been used to help doctors diagnose and treat disease. But Watson’s greatest trick might still be ahead of it: beating back the scourge of patent trolls. More »


Science

Nano-Scale LEDs Toast Lasers When It Comes To Data Transfer

3:40AM November 18, 2011 | Jamie Condliffe

When it comes to transferring huge amounts of data in the fastest possible time, copper sucks. What you need to use is light. Until now that meant lasers — but nano-scale LEDs can do it with a fraction of the energy. More »


Computing

Amazon Powers Silk With One Of The World’s Fastest Supercomputers

2:50AM November 18, 2011 | Jamie Condliffe

All the hype surrounding Amazon at the moment centres on the Kindle Fire. But behind the scenes, they’ve been developing one of the world’s most powerful super computers — and it powers the Fire’s browser, Silk. More »


Science

Revealed! Every Evil Atom Of The H1N1 Flu Virus

10:00AM November 16, 2011 | Kristen Philipkoski

The H1N1 flu pandemic killed 17,000 people across the globe between 2009 and 2010. Pretty terrifying. To prevent that from ever happening again, scientists have created a super-detailed computer model of the killer virus. More »


Computing

Japan’s K Computer Is The Fastest Of Them All

12:45PM November 4, 2011 | Andrew Tarantola

The K supercomputer just got a bit quicker, boosting its computational output to 10.5 quadrillion calculations per second and making it the speediest number-crunching system on the planet. More »


Computing

The Gordon Supercomputer Is A Solid State Powerhouse

2:30AM October 20, 2011 | Andrew Tarantola

The Gordon supercomputer, currently being built here at the San Diego Supercomputer centre by Appro International, is the first of its kind. utilising a quarter-petabyte of flash memory, Gordon will power through data-heavy applications way faster than vanilla parallel-processing supercomputers. More »


Computing

How To Make A 50-Petaflop Supercomputer Even More Powerful

6:58AM October 12, 2011 | Andrew Tarantola

Supercomputing has hit a wall — researchers can’t simply daisy-chain any more processors together to increase computational power due to energy constraints. The new Titan project hopes to do an end-around on that issue by transferring some of the load to… graphics cards? More »


Computing

Fujitsu K, The 548,352-Core Supercomputer

12:48AM October 6, 2011 | Gary Cutlack

This approachable perspex box is a section of the Fujitsu K. Despite looking like it should be selling Mars bars, cans of Coke, condoms and toothbrushes to businessmen, this cabinet makes up part of the current “world’s fastest supercomputer”. More »


Computing

The Cloud Server So Large They Should Call It ‘Hurricane’

1:30AM September 28, 2011 | Andrew Tarantola

As computational-heavy research gains momentum, the amount of data researchers generate is exploding — a single sequencing of DNA requires as much as 28 terabytes. So where do American researchers store their most ginormous data sets? In the largest academic cloud server in the US, at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. More »