Supercomputer with 68,000+ CPUs is world's fastest

The Fujitsu K computer has 672 racks, 68,544 CPUs, and leads TOP500.Org's 37th list of worlds fastest supercomputers. When fully assembled in 2012, the K computer will have over 800 racks and be designed to reach 10 petaflops.

What would you do with all that computing power?

Calculate the environmental impact of running the whole system for a day.

What else, play Angry Birds.

in World Of Warcraft.

I thought this was pretty cool:
http://www.fujitsu.com/global/about/tech/k/whatis/network/

Plus, Linux comes in handy again. I wonder what other operating systems the designers had considered.

If you think I'm going to pay one more cent in taxes before you do something about these mosquitoes, you've got another thing coming, mister!

I take alot of pictures and wedding videos so this will be right up my street for backup purposes. Though the electric bill will be very high, i will have to buy out a power station to run this thing.

...worms, troyans, spyware, malware, adware......and everything alike on the Internet

I believe this article (and most modern thinking on "supercomputers") is missing the most basic point in the definition of what a "supercomputer" really is. The article references what really is a super-parallel *NOT* a super-computer system. A true super computer is one where a single CPU in one step after another until the end of the program fetches, decodes & executes faster than any other available single CPU system. The true test of a real super computer is not complex multi-input parallel processing weather pattern or atomic level phenomena analysis but rather how fast a step by step problem where the output from step 1 processing is required as input to step 2 etc. can be solved. In simpler terms a super computer system is one with the fastest straight line instruction rate for one CPU, not the greatest aggregate rate for the largest collection of parallel CPUs.

Why wouldn't the definition of Super-Computer evolve the same way the computer has? Seems to me this qualifies as a Super-Computer

Nowhere in the term does it suggest that it has to be a single CPU with serial computing to achieve a given task.

Parallel computing can take a task, break it into many minute tasks, which will be run concurrently, and at the end, it will have arrived at the results many times faster than a single CPU computer.

I think the present meaning is closest to "A computer optimized for massive processing power to the extent that mass production is not relevant".
Always, when we hear about supercomputers they're these mammoths, usually with identifying names, rather than type names.

Unique, towering beasts.

Looking back about 40 years, the Cray-1 (which certainly *WAS* a supercomputer) achieved it's enormous speed via parallel processing: The various "vector" mathematical units would be fed data as a continuous pipeline. The actual execution time was several clocks long, but each clock cycle could accept another input datum and finish another output datum.

What you describe is exactly the situation which programmers would try VERY, VERY HARD to avoid doing: Using the result of on calculation as input for the next. The Cray-1 could do this for address calculations, and for a data addition leading into a multiplication on each Vector Element, but using a result in any other way would break the pipeline. Such sequential, "scalar" operations were a bad thing. (And they still are.)

Furthermore, your notion of "a single CPU doing all the work" was abandoned even earlier. Computers like the Cray-1, and it's predecessors, *AND* your modern PC, all depend of "helper" processors to do a lot of the work. How much?

Well, as a specific example, the CDC 6600 didn't even have an instruction to store a register value to memory! You would store your result in one of a "special" group of registers, and then a "peripheral processor" would take over the rest of the work.

And what is a "single CPU", anyway? Again using the various Cray-1 models as the example of a "classic" supercomputer, most of them consisted of over 100,000 4-5 NAND gate chips. (Anyway, I worked there for a few years, in software.)
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This is definitely a supercomputer. It's interesting, however, that this computer is built from Fujitsu's own SPARC chips, rather than AMD or Intel.

Can it play Crysis? Cuz that's what I'd use it for.

The Ultimate answer to Life, the Universe and Everything is...
(You're not going to like it...) Is...

42

(Watch Illinois.)

I find it interesting it uses sparc, too. It'll be interesting to see performance and efficiency stats, how a sparc based system fares against the "standard" architecture on a one-to-one result based measure.

I'd put money on the sparc being more power efficient than an AMD or intel based system of equal capacity.

I bet they run Prime95 on it. It should find the highest number ha

nuff said

What will the Trinary state of Quantum do to binary computing. It will no longer be Yes/No but then their will be a Maybe. And you think the IRS messes up your tax papers now, wait until they have the Yes/Mo/Maybe to audit your 1040. The only ones with a full pay check will work for the IRS.