15:05 14 November 2005
NewScientist.com news service
Will Knight
The most powerful supercomputer on the planet has reached a scorching new processing speed, confirming its reputation as the world's top number-cruncher by some margin.
The BlueGene/L System ranks number one on the latest world rankings, a list of the 500 fastest supercomputers known as the Top500. It has come top of the last two lists but remains a work in progress ? it is made from modular units that can be easily added to its increase raw processing power. Since the last list in June 2005, BlueGene/L has more than doubled in size. It now has more than 130,000 individual processors.
The behemoth has now reached a peak speed of 280.6 teraflops (1 teraflop is one trillion calculations in 1 second). This is more than three times faster than its closest rival, another IBM-built machine called Watson Blue Gene. The latter is installed at the company's research centre in New York, US, and has been clocked at 91 teraflops.
BlueGene/L was jointly developed by IBM and the US National Nuclear Security Administration and is installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, US. The machine is used to simulate nuclear weapon explosions and model molecular dynamics. Once complete, it is expected to reach a maximum performance in excess of 367 teraflops.
US domination
The Top500 list is compiled twice yearly by a group of academics, using exhausting mathematical testing software to gauge the relative power of the each computer. The latest list was revealed at the Supercomputing Conference 2005, which is held in Seattle, US, this week.
The record for holding the number one spot for the longest is held by NEC's Earth Simulator, which remained at the top for five consecutive Top500 lists. But the Japanese machine has now slipped to seventh on the latest list. There are four new entries in the top 10, all of which are within US research centres.
The combined computing power of all the machines on the Top500 list is 2.30 petaflops (2.30 thousand trillion operations per second), more than double the same total from one year ago.
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Topic: Top supercomputer reaches new record speeds (Read 866 times)