A look at computing performance and usage

3.6GHz Pentium 4: 1 GFLOPS 1.8GHz Opteron: 3 GFLOPS (2003) 3.2GHz Xeon X5460, quad-core: 82

GFLOPS

IBM Roadrunner: 1.1 PFLOPS

1,105 TFLOPS 120,000 cores

AMD Opteron (1.8 GHz)PowerXCell 8i (3.2 Ghz)

Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico

$133M Manages US nuclear weapons

1,059 TFLOPS 150,000 cores: Opteron (2.3 GHz) Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee Usage awarded by the INCITE program

“Computational Protein Structure Prediction and

Protein Design”“Interaction of Turbulence and Chemistry in

Lean Premixed Laboratory Flames”Climate research, combustion, nuclear

physics, fusion energy, space physics, and fluid turbulence

487 TFLOPS 51,000 cores:

Xeon (3.0 GHz) NASA Ames

Research Center, California

478 TFLOPS 213,000 cores: PowerPC (700 MHz) Lawrence Livermore National

Laboratory, California Made in 2007, when it was the world’s

fastest Manages the US stockpile of nuclear

weapons (as the Roadrunner also does)

450 TFLOPS 164,000 cores: PowerPC (850 MHz) Argonne National Laboratory, Illinois Uses an architecture newer than Blue

Gene/L; can be expanded to 3 PFLOPS Usage granted by the U.S. Department

of Energy’s Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment programPhysics of star explosions

#6: Sun Ranger, nano-scale technology, Opteron

#7: Cray Franklin XT4, simulation and modeling

#8: Cray Jaguar XT4, Department of Energy projects

#9: Cray Red Storm XT3, nuclear stockpile testing

#10: Dawning 5000A, Opteron, China’s fastest weather forecasting oil exploration genetic research aviation and aeronautics

top500.org, networkworld.com nytimes.com cpu-world.com, intel.com, amd.com

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9085021 http://www.energy.gov/news/6321.htm http://www.lanl.gov/roadrunner/ http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9119859&intsrc=hm_list http://www.sc.doe.gov/ascr/incite/ http://www.nas.nasa.gov/Resources/Systems/pleiades.html https://asc.llnl.gov/computing_resources/bluegenel/ http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/bluegene/ http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-05/uoc-bgs050208.php http://www.chicagolife.net/content/chicago/Blue_Gene_Baby http://www.nersc.gov/ http://www.cs.sandia.gov/platforms/RedStorm.html