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.
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.
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?
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”.
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.
IBM’s insanely powerful supercomputer Watson is awesome. Obviously. But after its impressive public debut, I figured it wouldn’t function in the real world for a year or two. Instead, some medical patients will reap Watson’s rewards even sooner.
It took nine months and 1.4 million processor-hours of work from NASA’s Pleiades supercomputer but a group of researchers from UC Santa Cruz have discovered how, exactly, our galaxy was born.
Shut up and sit down, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Tianjin National Supercomputing Center: you’ve just had your petaflops handed to you by Japan’s Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science, whose K Computer is the #1 in the world.
Cray’s latest supercomputer uses AMD x86 processors with NVIDIA Tesla 20-Series GPU to create a supercomputer capable of more than 50 petaflops in computing power. A petaflop is a quadrillion (or a million billion) operations a second. MORE POWAHH.
