BEEp-BEEP, Roadrunner is TOP500 Computer

MANNHEIM, Germany; BERKELEY, Calif. & KNOXVILLE, Tenn.—

With the publication of the latest edition of the TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers today (Wednesday, June 18), the global high performance computing community has officially entered a new realm

—a supercomputer with a peak performance
of more than 1 petaflop/s
(one quadrillion floating point operations per second).

The new No. 1 system, built by IBM for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory and named “Roadrunner,” by LANL after the state bird of New Mexico achieved performance of 1.026 petaflop/s

—becoming the first supercomputer ever to reach this milestone.

At the same time, Roadrunner is also one of the most energy efficient systems on the TOP500.

A look at the Top500 List is Here:

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http://www.top500.org/list/2008/06/100
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Wingman out on a Petaflop...

All Right NEWEGG!

ASUS EAH4850/HTDI/512M Radeon
HD 4850 (Source: Newegg)

(These are the cards I've been blogging about in the last week or so. The GigaFlop version for integration with HPC systems like the TOP500 iron, retails for $1000.00 and has 1 terabite of ram on board...Wingman.)

Newegg has HD 4850 cards from Sapphire, MSI, Gigabyte, ASUS, and Diamond available for purchase now. The Sapphire Radeon HD4850 retails for $199.99 and has a $20 mail-in rebate. The Sapphire card appears to lack any software or games bundled with the card.

Likewise, Newegg has an ASUS HD 4850 card for a low $169.99 after a $30 mail-in rebate.

Specs show that all cards contain 800 stream processing units, 512MB of GDDR3, a 256-bit memory interface and support for Crossfire. Core clock speed for the cards is 625MHz. Despite the significantly increased number of stream processors on the 4850 compared to the 9800 GTX+, NVIDIA maintains that the GTX+ significantly outperforms the 4850. Hands-on reviews will provide the tale of the tape.

The HD 4850 wasn't expected to hit store shelves until June 25.

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Link:
http://www.dailytech.com/AMD+Radeon+HD+4850+Now+Available+to+Purchase+Priced+as+Low+as+170/article12157.htm
=======================================

I Love competition, don't you?

Wired magazine has an interesting article about
New Science's use of Super Data Crunching
Computers expanding role in Research...
Wingman, out.

The Next BIG FLOP by ELO aka Wingman...

The Top500 List comes out twice a year, and lists the TOP HPC (High Performance Computers) in the World.

Their performance is usually measured in X-FLOPs or X Floating Point Operations per second. This year that X will become PETA FLOPS meaning a Thousand Trillion floating point operations per SECOND, will be crossed this June.

A recent report of this outrageous rate (actually running faster than Moore's Law) tells us our current technology cannot scale much further.

(See the excellent article in May's Linux Magazine titled: "Just when You Thought it Was Safe to Ignore the Top500 List") www.linuxmagazine.com.
I admit I like checking out the list to see who is running what processors and with what OS, but of late that has been LINUX.
But it appears the End is Near and a New direction must be started for the Next milestone, after
petaflops and starting point may just be Software Centric.

I'll post the Next Top DOG in June.

Wingman