|
|
IBM may build fastest supercomputer
Author: Phil CogarPublished: 7th August 2007
IBM looks set to build the world's fastest supercomputer for an eye-watering £98 million.
With a build cost of £98 million and an operating cost of more than £196 million over the next five years, the new supercomputer has been surrounded by controversy as numerous supercomputer centres and United States state governments have vied for the award.
For the better part of the two decades, the fastest computers in the country have been at either the national laboratories at Los Alamos, New Mexico, or Livermore, California and have been primarily used in the design and preservation of nuclear weapons and other classified applications.
The new supercomputer, however, will concentrate on major science projects like simulating the impact of global warming and will represent a shift in the balance of computing power between military and scientific computing centres.
The decision isn't final though as the National Science Board must ratify it before the award is given.
What other types of scientific applications do you think this new supercomputer will be used for? Let us know what you think in the comments section below or over in the forums.
Related articles on bit-tech.net
Comments (31)Stats: 0.142 seconds
Seriously scary how much power that thing will have. Hell, it's scary to think about the software written to run on one of them.
Wonder how it would compare with one of these distributed computing projects (SETI etc)
At least that's what we're being told...
They say it's for global warming to be solved, but how much power would go into running the thing?
HAH, my thoughts exactly, by the time they finished running there calculations they would have worked out they could have saved man kind a further 10years by not running that beast.
I bet it will run Oblivion and Crysis like liquid though :D
Now THAT would be a case mod project and a half!
more seriously, there's a flaw : a huuuge power hungry beast (wattage of such a thing ?) is used to calculate and simulate the effects of global warming. Sweeet irony indeed.
If you're in the right place at the right time, you can pick up a mid-80s Cray for $5000 or so... They're usually torn apart for the bits of gold in them. Of course, a QX6800 will run circles around it, but it's still a Cray.
Imagine turning a Cray into a modern Beowulf cluster... Talk about a nifty case mod.
I wish you egghead types would stop talking in such arcane techie talk. ;)
I bet it won't. :p
If I'm not mistaken, Supercomputers are built as pure calculation powerhouses, not the kind of hardware we're familiar with that'll run x86 software.
I doubt it's even possible to load *any* desktop-computer software on it at all :p
Mind you, I'm far from being an expert on the topic..
Point. :)
Don't they currently hold the award anyway, with bluegene ? i thought that was the fastest supercomputer in the world
Although it does have a MTBF of like 4 hours
Oh and as to the computing bit of it, modern super computers basically are a baewolf cluster, it because too difficult to build ginormous motherboards, so now their just lots of multi-cored, multi socketed computers
That, or an old, wizend man with a long beard.
N'ah. There'd be a mouse and a potato inside.
Why? Well, the mouse would run a treadmill, to power the potato. D'uh.
rofl! :)
:|
Sure its not the other way round?
According to this news article (link below), the patato would be powering the treadmill :? :D
http://totl.net/Spud/media/news.bbc.co.uk/
Or Joe has just cracked it as to why the patatos have the power, because of the mice!!!
Don't be absurd, lemons don't grow in the desert.
turkeyman cheesecake!
Two words: Lenin. Desert.
How random.
There's no mice, there's certainly no potatoes and definately no lolcats.
Supercomputers are measured in hpi (hamsters per inch).
Surely everyone knows that?!
Btw, there's jobs available to work on that supercomputer in the weekly rag I get at work.
Sulk Station Iceberg 2000!
lol