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View Full Version : Massive $208 million petascale computer gets green light

Als
09-07-2008, 11:39 AM
The 200,000 processor core system known as Blue Waters got the green light recently as the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and its National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) said it has finalized the contract with IBM to build the world's first sustained petascale computational system.


Others too are building toward a petaflop generation (http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/27544). NASA, Intel and SGI (http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/27622) in May said they would team up to crank up the space agency's supercomputing power, making it up to 16 times more powerful than it is today. Specifically, NASA Ames, Intel and SGI will work together on a project called Pleiades to develop a system with a capacity of one Petaflops peak performance by 2009 and a system with a peak performance of 10 Petaflops by 2012.

http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/32152
Nixon
09-07-2008, 04:51 PM
Skynet is coming....
ysvry
09-08-2008, 02:00 AM
I want one too , im sick of waiting for renders to finish :P
davius
09-08-2008, 03:17 AM
Yeah, petaflops and stuff... but will it run crysis?
avinashlobo
09-08-2008, 09:04 AM
So what's the performance-to-wisecrack ratio of these supercomputers anyway?

200k cores. Sigh. Look away my renderfarm pretties. Look away...
akademus
09-08-2008, 10:20 AM
I still think that Deep Thought kicks a$$. Way better that Milliard Gargantuabrain and Googleplex Starthinker.
biliousfrog
09-08-2008, 03:38 PM
Yeah, petaflops and stuff... but will it run crysis?

Will it run Vista?
BigPixolin
09-08-2008, 04:30 PM
Will it run Vista?

A billion times over. My mac pro runs it beautifully with all the bells and whistles.
tonytrout
09-09-2008, 05:47 AM
its really only roughly equivalent to the brain processing power of a car load of blondes. Sad isnt it how far we have come in 50 years.
blenderhead
09-09-2008, 04:29 PM
its really only roughly equivalent to the brain processing power of a car load of blondes. Sad isnt it how far we have come in 50 years.

Uhhhh...what?
mustique
09-09-2008, 04:50 PM
real time Maxwell renderfarm
subtlebluetones
09-09-2008, 05:14 PM
Uhhhh...what?

Its a joke.....
tonytrout
09-09-2008, 08:59 PM
The generally accepted processing power of one (1) adult brain is about 100 teraflops, so I figure 5 blondes in a VW is probably eqivalent to Mr IBMs big boy. Ok maybe 2 VWs as they are blonde after all.

Sobering isn't it?
grantmoore3d
09-09-2008, 09:42 PM
The generally accepted processing power of one (1) adult brain is about 100 teraflops, so I figure 5 blondes in a VW is probably eqivalent to Mr IBMs big boy. Ok maybe 2 VWs as they are blonde after all.

So what you're trying to say is that, it will be as powerful as two sat-nav systems? :D
OneSharpMarble
09-10-2008, 02:12 AM
Uhhhh...what?

I am pretty sure Blue Waters would have got that one. :D
Mike Pauza
09-15-2008, 06:07 PM
I used to work at NCSA, and while those numbers are very impressive (mostly PR) actual compute power any particular NCSA group receives will be MUCH less due to processor sharing among a lot of groups and incredibly slow data passing between multiple processors...most supercomputing simulation apps aren't nearly as parallel as rendering. :)

-Mike
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