Japan reveals world's fastest Supercomputer (8.2 Petaflops !!)

[Vehl]

Japanese supercomputer 'K' is world's fastest



A new Japanese supercomputer called "K" is being hailed as the world's fastest - three times more powerful than the previous holder of the title. K is built by the Japanese computer firm Fujitsu, based in Kobe's Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science. It is capable of making 8.2 quadrillion (a quadrillion is 1 followed by 15 zeroes) calculations per second - or, in computer jargon, 8.2 petaflops.

The previous fastest machine was the Chinese computer Tianhe-1A, which was clocked at 2.507 petaflops.

K's performance is equivalent to one million linked desktop computers, according to Prof Dongarra, or more than its five closest competitors combined. It consists of 672 cabinets stuffed with circuit-boards, and its creators plan to increase that to 800 in the coming months. It uses enough energy to power nearly 10,000 homes and costs $10 million (£6.2 million) annually to run.

more here
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/8586655/Japanese-supercomputer-K-is-worlds-fastest.html

This is awesome news! I was waiting for the Japanese to come up with such a machine the moment I heard last year that the Chinese have taken the top supercomputer spot, and they did not disappoint me. Congratulations to all the scientists and engineers who made this possible. Such machines will further scientific development and have tangle positive effects on human development much more than any war ever could.

On a related note, about a month ago India announced that it had initiated the development of a supercomputer that will be the first one to beat the Exaflop mark. The stated goal is 132 exaflops, or in other words a machine 50000 times faster than the Chinese Tianhe-1. The supercomputer is expected to be completed by 2017

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x1193565
^^ thread on that machine.


The positive side of such a competition, of countries trying to outdo each other in this field is that the net beneficiaries will be humans. As I said before..this beats the hell out of trying to one-up each other in the construction of weapons of war.

[Poll_Blind]

1. Great news! Can the Japanese government get some accurate fallout models now?

:shrug:

Oh, and tell us about them?

PB

[Brianboru]

2. Supercomputers are also used to design nuclear weapons

"Using this ability to think faster, Purple can simulate the explosion of a nuclear weapon -- from the moment the button is pressed to the point when the bomb detonates."

http://articles.cnn.com/2006-12-05/tech/supercomputers_1_supercomputers-dave-turek-ibm-s-deep-blue?_s=PM:TECH

[Vehl]

9. yeah

One of the main driving factors behind supercomputer development, in the 80s and 90s were the need to have machines powerful enough to simulate a nuclear explosion. I believe that nowadays they have machines, at least from ~2000 or so which are able to simulate such stuff pretty fast.

The modern ones, like "K" would probably be used in economic and weather forecasting...apparently weather forecasting with certainty is still beyond our current computing power...some experts suggest that we might need at least 1 Exaflop to predict a week's weather with certainty(or to the level theoretically predictable).

[midnight]

3. K&R

[The Midway Rebel]

4. Kewl.

Maybe that fucker will be smart enough to figure out how to clean the radiation and wipe the egg off of the faces of the most honorable TEPCO.

[RandySF]

5. Meanwhile, in America....

We continue to debate teaching evolution, sex ed. and whether to use the word "gay" in class.

[stevedeshazer]

6. Cool. Now I know what a petaflop is.

:)

[postulater]

7. How large is the solar array that powers it?

[guitar man]

8. But somehow

Internet explorer still takes 15 seconds to load :silly:

[Vehl]

10. go firefox :P

I stopped using IE the moment Firefox came out. Nowadays it's a close call(at least for me) between Firefox and Chrome, but I stick with Firefox for the time being :)

[kentauros]

11. Go Opera

http://www.opera.com/">Opera :D

I was using Google Maps earlier today to point out some massive pipe yard and manufacturing facilities I didn't know we had here (east side of town) and it was going from one zoom level to the next without lag. While my coworker to whom I sent the link was having to wait for IE to pull in each individual square of image before he could go to the next level. Severe lag! But that's normal for Internet Exploder ;)

[MilesColtrane]

12. ...and the inexorable march toward the Singularity continues unabated.

[miyazaki]

13. Figured you would get jumped by the nuclear peanut gallery.

But thanks for posting.

[LiberalAndProud]

14. Wait three years and that machine will be history.

According to The New York Times, the rankings change so rapidly that June 2008's fastest machine, at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, has dropped to 10th place.

I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do. -- HAL

[Monk06]

15. With that bandwidth FreeRepublic won't crash on Romney threads anymore.

[Vehl]

16. NSA Building $896.5 Million Supercomputing Center

The National Security Agency is designing a new $895.6 million supercomputing center that will be constructed at its Fort Meade, Md., headquarters over the next several years, Department of Defense budget documents reveal.

The NSA's new High Performance Computing Center, slated to be complete by December 2015, will be designed to with energy efficiency, security, and lots of "state-of-the-art" computing horsepower in mind, according to unclassified specs found in the documents, which detail numerous military construction project budgets, including several NSA efforts.

more here
http://www.informationweek.com/news/government/enterprise-architecture/229402009