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A U.S. supercomputer has won back the crown in the never-ending battle for the world's most powerful supercomputer. Its victory is the latest milestone marking the steady climb of computing power all across the globe. The Top500 industry list gave its No. 1 ranking to the Sequoia supercomputer housed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California — a spot earned by Sequoia's ability to crunch 16.32 quadrillion calculations per second (16.32 petaflops/s). Such supercomputing power is used by the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration to simulate nuclear weapons tests for older weapons that have been sitting in the U.S. arsenal....

MANNHEIM, Germany; BERKELEY, Calif.; and KNOXVILLE, Tenn.—For the first time since November 2009, a United States supercomputer sits atop the TOP500 list of the world’s top supercomputers. Named Sequoia, the IBM BlueGene/Q system installed at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory achieved an impressive 16.32 petaflop/s on the Linpack benchmark using 1,572,864 cores. Sequoia is also one of the most energy efficient systems on the list, which will be released Monday, June 18, at the 2012 International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany. This will mark the 39th edition of the list, which is compiled twice each year. Complete...

Tokyo, November 2, 2011 — RIKEN and Fujitsu today announced that the "K computer(1)," which is a supercomputer currently under their joint development, has achieved a LINPACK(2) benchmark performance of 10.51 petaflops (10.51 quadrillion floating point operations per second). The supercomputer system used for these tests is in its final configuration of 864 racks, comprising a total of 88,128 interconnected CPUs. With an execution efficiency of 93.2%, this system further exceeds its first place winning performance on the 37th TOP500 list(3) international ranking of supercomputers published in June 2011, where it scored 93.0%. Although development is still underway to adjust...

When I was selected as one of the two human players to be pitted against IBM's "Watson" supercomputer in a special man-vs.-machine Jeopardy! exhibition match, I felt honored, even heroic. I envisioned myself as the Great Carbon-Based Hope against a new generation of thinking machines—which, if Hollywood is to be believed, will inevitably run amok, build unstoppable robot shells, and destroy us all. But at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Lab, an Eero Saarinen-designed fortress in the snowy wilds of New York's Westchester County, where the shows taped last month, I wasn't the hero at all. I was the villain....

After conquering puny humans Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter and winning a total of $77,147 over three days and two full games on Jeopardy!, IBM's know-it-all new supercomputer is going to med school. On Wednesday, IBM, along with Nuance Communications Inc. and the Columbia University and University of Maryland medical schools, announced that they are developing Watson as a diagnostic tool that can help doctors identify diseases and recommend treatments. They hope to begin lab tests as early as next year, with real world testing later in 2012. "What makes Watson unique is that it can rip through massive amounts...

Mankind put up a fight in the first round, but the second round was all machine. The good news: For once, Time magazine is right. The Singularity is near, my friends.The bad news: We all know how this story ends. The computer brained its human competition in Game 1 of the Man vs. Machine competition on “Jeopardy!”On the 30-question game board, veteran “Jeopardy!” champs Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter managed only five correct responses between them during the Double Jeopardy round that aired Tuesday. They ended the first game of the two-game face-off with paltry earnings of $2,400 and $5,400,...

Almost 2,000 Sony PlayStation game consoles have been networked by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) to create an affordable supercomputer that is being used to develop techniques to process and analyze huge quantities of imagery from wide-area surveillance systems. The Condor Cluster created by AFRL’s Information Division at Rome AFB, N.Y., comprises 1,760 PlayStation 3 consoles and 168 high-performance graphics processors connected by a high-bandwidth network. The cluster has a peak performance of 500 teraflops (trillion floating-point operations per second). Built for about $2 million, the Condor is the 34th most powerful supercomputer in the world, but it...

A research lab in China has made the fastest supercomputer in the world. With this, it has been able to replace US in having the hold on this segment of technology. But as China is trying to realize its dream of becoming the best in hi-tech, US has asked it to control its demand in rare earth elements. These elements are used in many a high-technology applications and have been in great demand by China. To be able to get hold of these, China has been flexing its muscles for the last few months and has attracted attention especially from...

A Chinese scientific research center has built the fastest supercomputer ever made, replacing the United States as maker of the swiftest machine, and giving China bragging rights as a technology superpower. The computer, known as Tianhe-1A, has 1.4 times the horsepower of the current top computer, which is at a national laboratory in Tennessee, as measured by the standard test used to gauge how well the systems handle mathematical calculations, said Jack Dongarra, a University of Tennessee computer scientist who maintains the official supercomputer rankings. Although the official list of the top 500 fastest machines, which comes out every six...

A Chinese supercomputer has been ranked as the world’s second-fastest machine, surpassing European and Japanese systems and underscoring China’s aggressive commitment to science and technology. The Dawning Nebulae, based at the National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen, China, has achieved a sustained computing speed of 1.27 petaflops — the equivalent of one thousand trillion mathematical operations a second — in the latest semiannual ranking of the world’s fastest 500 computers. The newest ranking was made public on Monday at the International Supercomputer Conference in Hamburg, Germany. Supercomputers are used for scientific and engineering problems as diverse as climate simulation and automotive...

When US Air Force researchers last year created the mother-of-all-processors using Sony PlayStation-3 game consoles, it seemed like a stroke of cost-saving genius.To deliver a 53-TerraFLOP processing cluster, the Air Force Research Laboratory in Rome, N.Y., hoovered up 1,700 PlayStation-3 game consoles, then harnessed the power of their combined processors to evaluate new breakthroughs in technology for synthetic aperture radar, high definition video and something called "neuromorphic computing". At the time, the researchers noted that two PlayStation-3 consoles provide 150 GigaFLOPs of processing power for $600, but a single 3.2GHz cell processor delivers 200 GFLOPs for $8,000. Why spend the...

In response to the continuous compromise of networks, multiple countries have begun developing secure platforms and operating systems. Computer companies, university researchers, defense R&D contractors and militaries around the world recognize the criticality of networks and embedded processors within their equipment. They also recognize how vulnerable they are and that’s why so much attention is being given to building in security at every level of the system including the operating system. As discussed here, China’s Trusted Computing Platform (TCP) program has been underway for some time now and can be traced back to the early 2000s. The Chinese TCP includes...

Scientists in Iowa simply can't wait to do computational chemistry at a quadrillion calculations per second. "Petascale power is required for accuracy," said Monica Lamm, an Iowa State assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering and associate scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory who studies complex molecular binding. "Now we have to use methods that are less accurate and less reliable." The source of the new and improved computing power is Blue Waters, a supercomputer that's being developed as a joint effort of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, its National Center for Supercomputing Applications, IBM, and...

Washington, DC: A cat can recognize a face faster than a supercomputer. And that's one of the reasons why a feline brain is the model for a biologically inspired computer project involving the University of Michigan. U-M computer engineer Wei Lu has taken a step toward developing this revolutionary type of machine that could be capable of learning and recognizing, as well as making more complex decisions and performing more tasks simultaneously than conventional computers can. Lu previously built a "memristor," a device that replaces a traditional transistor and acts like a biological synapse, remembering past voltages it was subjected...

The military is a major user of supercomputers (the fastest computers on the planet). These machines were first developed, as were the first computers, for military applications. These ultra-powerful computers are used for code breaking, and to help design weapons (including nukes) and equipment (especially electronics). The military is also needs lots of computing power for data mining (pulling useful information, about the enemy, from ever larger masses of information.) Because there's never enough money to buy all the super-computers (which are super expensive) needed, military researchers have come up with ways to do it cheaper. A decade ago, it...

The push is on to build exascale systems that can solve the planet's biggest problems There is a race to make supercomputers as powerful as possible to solve some of the world's most important problems, including climate change, the need for ultra-long-life batteries for cars, operating fusion reactors with plasma that reaches 150 million degrees Celsius and creating bio-fuels from weeds and not corn. Supercomputers allow researchers to create three-dimensional visualizations, not unlike a video game, to run endless "what-if" scenarios with increasingly finer detail. But as big as they are today, supercomputers aren't big enough -- and a key...

As perhaps the clearest evidence yet of the computing power of sophisticated but inexpensive video-game consoles, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has assembled a supercomputer from an army of Sony PlayStation 2's. The resulting system, with components purchased at retail prices, cost a little more than $50,000. The center's researchers believe the system may be capable of a half trillion operations a second, well within the definition of supercomputer, although it may not rank among the world's 500 fastest supercomputers. Perhaps the most striking aspect of the project, which uses the open...

(PhysOrg.com) -- UMass Dartmouth Physics Professor Gaurav Khanna and UMass Dartmouth Principal Investigator Chris Poulin have created a step-by-step guide to building a home-brewed supercomputer that can reduce the cost of university and general computing research.Found at http://www.ps3cluster.org , the resource fully illustrates how to create a fully functioning and high performance supercomputer with the Sony Playstation 3.Last year, Khanna’s construction of a small supercomputer using eight Sony-donated Playstation 3 gaming consoles made headlines nationwide in the scientific community. On the consoles, he is solving complex equations designed to predict the properties of gravitational waves generated by the black holes...

(PhysOrg.com) -- Using only the computing power of 16 Sony Playstation 3 gaming consoles, scientists at The University of Alabama in Huntsville and the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, have solved a mystery about the speed at which vibrating black holes stop vibrating.It may be the first time this kind of research has been conducted exclusively on a PS3 cluster: A related 2007 UMass Dartmouth/UAHuntsville project using a smaller PS3 cluster also used a "traditional" supercomputer to run its simulations. The biggest advantage of the console cluster — the PS3 Gravity Grid — at UMass Dartmouth was the cost saving, said...

Dr Gaurav Khanna is a professor at the University of Massachusetts. He has been renting supercomputers at NASA and the US National Science Foundation for US$20,000-$30,000 a year to run complicated calculations on just how much radiation is emitted in the process of a black hole swallowing a star... "For US$4,000 or so, I can get eight PS3s that can do the same task that I'd do on a supercomputer. For a one-time cost, I have this resource I can use privately. I can use it indefinitely over and over again. That's hugely attractive. That's why I considered the project....