World’s fastest supercomputers unveiled

by admin October 29, 2005 at 4:54 pm

Nuclear testing in a Big Blue box

The US National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has unveiled two new IBM supercomputers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), which are capable of the fastest processing speeds yet achieved.

The 65,536 processor BlueGene/L supercomputer has performed a record 280.6 trillion operations per second on the industry standard LINPACK benchmark – software used to rank the speeds of the world’s fastest machines.

Purple, the other half of the most powerful supercomputing twosome, is a machine capable of 100 trillion operations per second as it conducts simulations of a complete nuclear weapons performance.

Together, the Purple and BlueGene/L systems will perform half a petaflop, or half of a quadrillion (1,000,000,000,000,000) operations per second.

Full article: vnunet.com