Free Republic

IBM's 200 petaFLOPS (200,000 trillion calculations per second) Summit supercomputer was unveiled at Oak Ridge National Laboratory last Friday and, scaled up, has proven itself capable of exascale computing in some applications. That's 1,000 petaFLOPS or one quintillion floating point operations per second.In comparison, the Cray/Intel Aurora supercomputer project clocked in at 180 petaFLOPS with 50,000 x86 nodes, interconnected with 200Gbit/s OmniPath 2.These nodes were supposed to be augmented with Intel's Knights Hill version of its multicore Phi co-processor. However, the Knights Hill development was canned in November 2017. Aurora has given way to Aurora 2, due for delivery in...

ISC 2012For the second time in the past two years, a new supercomputer has taken the top ranking in the Top 500 list of supercomputers – and it does not use a hybrid CPU-GPU architecture. But the question everyone will be asking at the International Super Computing conference in Hamburg, Germany today is whether this is the last hurrah for such monolithic parallel machines and whether the move toward hybrid machines where GPUs or other kinds of coprocessors do most of the work is inevitable. LLNL's Sequoia BlueGene/Q super being assembled by IBM (click to enlarge) No one can predict...