Japan Bests IBM in Supercomputer Stakes – NewsFactor Network
In the supercomputer universe, bragging rights go to the machine packed with the most number-crunching speed. And a spirited competition has raged for several years now between the U.S. and Japan for leadership in high-performance computing. For the last two years, IBM’s BlueGene/L at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory kept the U.S. in the lead over a meteorological modeling machine developed by NEC called the Earth Simulator.
For those of you keeping score out there, Japan is about to take back the world speed record for computing it held earlier in the decade. The MDGrape-3 at Riken (formerly known as the Institute of Physical & Chemical Research) in Yokohama was clocked at a mind-boggling one quadrillion calculations per second. In industry-speak, that’s one “petaflop” of floating-point calculations per second.
After nearly four years in development and $9 million spent, the Riken machine is the first ever to accomplish the feat. It’s nearly three times swifter than BlueGene/L, the official No. 1 in an industry ranking called the Top 500 Supercomputer Sites. The MDGrape-3 wasn’t ready in time to qualify for the list which was released on June 27. It could top the next one, but the machine may be ineligible because of its specialized hardware. Here we take a look at the Riken machine and the global supercomputer race. [Read on]