What is the name of the fastest computer in the world? [Archive]

cashcowhq

01-21-2010, 12:31 PM

The Earth Simulator Computer (ESC) is the fastest supercomputer in the world, located at the Earth Simulator Center in Kanazawa-ku (ward), Yokohama-shi, Japan. The computer is capable of 35.6 trillion (35,600,000,000,000) floating-point calculations per second. The system was developed by NASDA, JAERI, and JAMSTEC from 1997 for climate simulation. Construction started in October 1999 and was completed by February 2002, the site officially opened on March 11, 2002. The project cost 7.2 billion yen.

Built by NEC, the ESC is based on their SX-6 architecture. It consists of 640 nodes with eight vector processors and 16 gigabytes of computer memory at each node, for a total of 5120 processors and 10 terabytes of memory. Two nodes are installed per 1 metre x 1.4 metre x 2 metre cabinet, each cabinet consumes 20 KVA of power. The system has 700 terabytes of disk storage (450 for the system and 250 for the users) and 1.6 petabytes of mass storage in tape drives. The ESC is almost five times faster than IBM ASCI White and more powerful than the next five fastest machines combined (as of 2002).

It has been able to run holistic simulations of global climate in both the atmosphere and the ocean down to a precision of 10 km.
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July 2004:
IBM has won a contract to build what will be the U.S. military's fastest supercomputer. The system, dubbed Kraken after a mythic sea monster that sinks ships, will run at 20 teraflops--about three times faster than any current system in use by the Department of Defense.

IBM is building Kraken for the Navy's Major Shared Resource Center at the Naval Oceanographic Office at Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. The system features 368 IBM p655 eServers--each containing eight Power 4+ processors--connected to operate as a single unit. The system will use IBM's AIX Unix operating system. IBM officials say the Navy paid tens of millions of dollars for Kraken but declined to be more specific. Navy officials weren't immediately available for comment.

Kraken is designed to let naval scientists and engineers more quickly solve problems that can affect the outcome of military engagements. Among other things, it will improve their weather forecasting, missile design, and oceanographic-mapping capabilities. The system is scheduled to begin operating by September.

Debra Goldfarb, VP for strategy and products in IBM's Deep Computing unit, says the challenge is in roping more than 300 servers into a unified system. "It's not an easy thing to make happen," she says. Tweaking applications to take advantage of the system's full power presents a number of challenges, Goldfarb says. Currently, the fastest computer in the world is an NEC-built 40-teraflop system at the Earth Simulator Center in Japan.