IBM and Sun develop pentaflop computers

by Jan Harris

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thank you for visiting!

IBM has developed a new Blue Gene supercomputer which will be able to process up to three quadrillion operations a second, or three petaflops.

In real life situations, the Blue Gene/P, will be able to operate continuously at more than one petaflop.

The Blue Gene/P wrests the title of most powerful computer on earth from the Blue Gene/L, which can operate at a mere 280 teraflops, or 280 trillion operations a second during continuous operation.

Blue Gene/P is a Linux cluster system. It has four 850-MHz PowerPC 450 processors integrated on a single chip.

The configuration is a 294,912-processor, 72-rack system harnessed to a high-speed, optical network. A new SMP mode supports multithreaded applications.

Blue Gene/P is at least seven times more energy efficient than any other supercomputer.

Following close on IBM’s heels in the supercomputer race is Sun Microsystems Inc.

Sun has secured a $59 million contract from the University of Texas for its Constellation design which provides 21 million floating-point operations per second, potentially reaching 2 petaflops.

Sun will install the Constellation at the Texas Advanced Computing Center along with other supercomputers.

It is a Linux cluster system and will have 3,288 nodes, starting out with 26,304 processing cores, using AMD’s forthcoming Barcelona 4-core Opteron design, mounted on Sun blades.

Ultimately, there will be 1,302 Opterons providing 52,608 cores. The system components are connected by InfiniBand.

Questions? Discuss this in our Internet Business forums for help and advice

Story link: IBM and Sun develop pentaflop computers

Add to Bookmarks: