TOP500 Supercomputer Sites For 2006

geaux writes to let us know about the release of the 28th TOP500 List of the world's fastest supercomputers. From the article: "The IBM BlueGene/L system, installed at DOE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, retains the No. 1 spot with a Linpack performance of 280.6 teraflops (trillions of calculations per second, or Tflop/s). The new No. 2 systems is Sandia National Laboratories' Cray Red Storm supercomputer, only the second system ever to be recorded to exceed the 100 Tflops/s mark with 101.4 Tflops/s... Slipping to No. 3 is the IBM eServer Blue Gene Solution system, installed at IBM's Thomas Watson Research Center, with 91.20 Tflops/s Linpack performance." You need over 6.6 Tflop/s to make it into the top 100.

Re:beowulf

[Laser Lou]

just beowulf 100 PS3s together, that should be able to pull it off

That's not how to say it. You are supposed to say "Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of these?"

Re:Out of Date

[hlimethe3rd]

I assume that you're talking about the MDGRAPE machine that can do a petaflop. Actually, that machine is specialized for one type of calculation, thus it cannot run then LINPACK benchmark, and doesn't qualify for this list. It is not a general supercomputer. It's the same thing as claiming that a top-shelf GPU is faster than a top-shelf CPU: it's true for only a certain type of calculation.