A Computer for the Clouds
August 1, 2008
By PHILIP E. ROSS
Columnist
IEEE Spectrum: Inside Technology
In May an IBM-built supercomputer called Roadrunner crunched through a quadrillion floating-point operations per second, officially becoming the first supercomputer to break the petaflop barrier. But unofficially, that barrier had fallen two years before, when MDGRAPE-3, a machine at Japan's Riken Institute, in Wako, powered up. Accepted benchmarking methods ruled out that performance because MDGRAPE-3 is a purpose-built computer, able to model molecular interactions and little else. Yet the machine cost Riken just one-tenth of Roadrunner's price--more than US$100million--and consumes just one-tenth the power.
About NERSC and Berkeley Lab
The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) is the primary high-performance computing facility for scientific research sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science. Located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the NERSC Center serves more than 4,000 scientists at national laboratories and universities researching a wide range of problems in combustion, climate modeling, fusion energy, materials science, physics, chemistry, computational biology, and other disciplines. Berkeley Lab is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory located in Berkeley, California. It conducts unclassified scientific research and is managed by the University of California for the U.S. DOE Office of Science. For more information about computing sciences at Berkeley Lab, please visit www.lbl.gov/cs.
