I dare someone to ask whether or not it could run Crysis and think they are being even slightly amusing.
IBM US nuke-lab beast 'Sequoia' is top of the flops (petaflops, that is)
For 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 …
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Monday 18th June 2012 10:37 GMT Anonymous Coward
I'm not a tree hugger or anything but...
...it's just a bleeding shame they put all this CPU grunt into running nuclear weapon simulations. If it turned its attention exclusively to say something like medical research (e.g protein folding etc..) just think of the benefits to humanity? Just saying.
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Tuesday 19th June 2012 04:09 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: I'm not a tree hugger or anything but...
Yahhhhhh!!!!!!! Meet Jesus, Be God!!!!!!!!!
MEGA - FUCKING - NUKES!!!!!!!
Just imagine that - drilling a 10,000 meter deep hole into Yellowstone Park and dropping a 100 megaton fusion nuke down it, with a million gallon tank of deutrium on top!!!!!!!!
"I am greater than god!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Monday 18th June 2012 20:41 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: I'm not a tree hugger or anything but...
Sadly, the two uses for these extremely powerful clusters (that I can remember) are for simulating nukes and the weather. Neither of which seems to have much lasting benefit to humanity. Even hurricane tracking and forecasting is shoved off to state university grade HPC clusters. However, BOINC--with a heavier focus on math, astronomy and medicine--seems to be doing rather well with enough processing power to put it in 4th place.
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Monday 18th June 2012 11:21 GMT Even Jelical
Is it me??????
Or does anyone reading this feel the same as when they watch Clarkson on top gear testing a car that 0.0000000000001% of the population will ever own or need? I for one have never experienced under-steer on the M25 or the need to calculate how quick the world could go fooom after pressing the appropriate buttons.................
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Monday 18th June 2012 20:51 GMT Kebabbert
Uses ZFS
This IBM supercomputer uses Lustre + ZFS. The reason ZFS was chosen is because it scales better, provide data integrity, etc.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5ASf53v4lI
http://zfsonlinux.org/docs/LUG11_ZFS_on_Linux_for_Lustre.pdf
I wonder why they did not choose the IBM GPFS filesystem.
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Monday 18th June 2012 20:58 GMT John Savard
What About Latency?
While the article notes that several things besides the raw number of floating-point operations per second is relevant to rating the real performance of a supercomputer, one thing that wasn't mentioned was latency - or single-thread performance. Not everything can be parallelized well.