Supercomputer smashes world speed record
http://www.newscientist.com/news/print.jsp?id=ns99992184
18:16 18 April 02
Will Knight
A Japanese supercomputer has recorded the fastest "floating point" calculation speed of any computer on the planet. The feat is reported in the latest edition of the Linpack report, a ranking of supercomputer performance.
The Earth Simulator at the Marine Science and Technology Center in Kanagawa, notched up 35.61 teraflops - that is over 35 trillion "floating point" calculations per second.
The speed is five times faster than that recorded by the previous record holder, IBM's ASCI White at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. This computer achieved a benchmark of 7.23 teraflops.
A spokesman for NEC told New Scientist that the Earth Simulator was tested using the Linpack benchmarking software. This provides a standard measure of the machine's ability to perform computationally intensive mathematical calculations.
Apples and oranges
But Hamid Arabnia, editor in chief of the Journal of Supercomputing, says the Earth Simulator could be built to perform certain tasks very well but not others.
"These guys should very much be encouraged. It's a very big achievement, but I don't think it is a breakthrough," Arabnia told New Scientist.
"One should not say that, because these guys are doing well in this particular benchmark, therefore their system is far better," he says. "At this technology level it is really like comparing apples with oranges."
2900 km of cable
The Earth simulator is used to simulate climate change using data collected by Earth-monitoring satellites. The NEC spokesman said the Earth Simulator's performance was achieved due to the use of very specialised processors.
The computer contains a total of 5104 processors in 640 separate "nodes", each containing eight NEC Vector processors. The complete machine spans the area of three tennis courts and has 2900 kilometres of cable, including 83,000 copper wires.
Jack Dongarra, who authored of the Linpack report and works at the University of Tennessee, says the Earth Simulator's achieves "high-speed numerical simulations with a processing speed 1000 times higher than that of the most frequently used supercomputers in 1996."
18:16 18 April 02
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© Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/print.jsp?id=ns99992184
18:16 18 April 02
Will Knight
A Japanese supercomputer has recorded the fastest "floating point" calculation speed of any computer on the planet. The feat is reported in the latest edition of the Linpack report, a ranking of supercomputer performance.
The Earth Simulator at the Marine Science and Technology Center in Kanagawa, notched up 35.61 teraflops - that is over 35 trillion "floating point" calculations per second.
The speed is five times faster than that recorded by the previous record holder, IBM's ASCI White at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. This computer achieved a benchmark of 7.23 teraflops.
A spokesman for NEC told New Scientist that the Earth Simulator was tested using the Linpack benchmarking software. This provides a standard measure of the machine's ability to perform computationally intensive mathematical calculations.
Apples and oranges
But Hamid Arabnia, editor in chief of the Journal of Supercomputing, says the Earth Simulator could be built to perform certain tasks very well but not others.
"These guys should very much be encouraged. It's a very big achievement, but I don't think it is a breakthrough," Arabnia told New Scientist.
"One should not say that, because these guys are doing well in this particular benchmark, therefore their system is far better," he says. "At this technology level it is really like comparing apples with oranges."
2900 km of cable
The Earth simulator is used to simulate climate change using data collected by Earth-monitoring satellites. The NEC spokesman said the Earth Simulator's performance was achieved due to the use of very specialised processors.
The computer contains a total of 5104 processors in 640 separate "nodes", each containing eight NEC Vector processors. The complete machine spans the area of three tennis courts and has 2900 kilometres of cable, including 83,000 copper wires.
Jack Dongarra, who authored of the Linpack report and works at the University of Tennessee, says the Earth Simulator's achieves "high-speed numerical simulations with a processing speed 1000 times higher than that of the most frequently used supercomputers in 1996."
18:16 18 April 02
Return to news story
© Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.
