ASC News
1st TOP500 List of World’s Most Powerful Supercomputers Topped by World’s First Petaflop/s System
Top500
Sat, 2008-06-14 00:03 | june2008
MANNHEIM, Germany; BERKELEY, Calif. & KNOXVILLE, Tenn.—With the publication of the latest edition of the TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers today (Wednesday, June 18), the global high performance computing community has officially entered a new realm—a supercomputer with a peak performance of more than 1 petaflop/s (one quadrillion floating point operations per second).
The new No. 1 system, built by IBM for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory and and named “Roadrunner,” by LANL after the state bird of New Mexico achieved performance of 1.026 petaflop/s—becoming the first supercomputer ever to reach this milestone. At the same time, Roadrunner is also one of the most energy efficient systems on the TOP500.—More
Faster Computers Accelerate Pace of Discovery
By Christopher Lee
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 3, 2007; Page A07
Sometime next year, developers will boot up the next generation of supercomputers, machines whose vast increases in processing power will accelerate the transformation of the scientific method, experts say.
The first “petascale” supercomputer will be capable of 1,000 trillion calculations per second. That’s about twice as powerful as today’s dominant model, a basketball-court-size beast known as BlueGene/L at the Energy Department’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California that performs a peak of 596 trillion calculations per second. —More
IBM’s Roadrunner Set to Smash Supercomputing Marks
Top500 list of speediest machines is now out, but upcoming IBM computer will top a quadrillion operations a second—more than double what we can do today.
By Michael Kanellos
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Published: November 12, 2007, 3:23 PM PST
IBM once again dominated the competition in semiannual rankings of supercomputers, but the big news is what’s coming next year.
Big Blue is working on a computer nicknamed “Roadrunner” that will combine Cell processors, a family of chips found inside the PlayStation 3, and processors from Advanced Micro Devices.
Roadrunner, which will be delivered to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in summer 2008, will be capable of performing more than a quadrillion operations, or a petaflop, when it’s fully operational. IBM helped design and build the Cell chip and has been looking for ways to expand its commercial potential. —More
Top500 list of the fastest supercomputers as of June 2008
Top500 list of the fastest supercomputers as of November 2007
Top500 list of the fastest supercomputers as of June 2007