Posted on Wednesday, November 04 2009 @ 19:01 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
Bright Side of NEws
reports scientists at the Chinse National University of Defense Technology have unveiled a petaFLOPS supercomputer that consists out of thousands of Intel Xeon processors along with 5,120 ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 2GB graphics cards. The system cost 600 million yuan (about $87.88 million) and delivers a theoretical performance of 1.206 PFLOPS.
This kind of performance took Chinese scientists by surprise. Zhang Yunquan, a researcher with the Institute of Software of the Chinese Academy of Sciences [CAS] was quoted: "I was shocked at the milestone breakthrough, which was beyond expectation, I previously forecast China's first petaflop computer no earlier than the end of 2010."
Unfortunately for researches involved - due to SPEC rules and regulations, GPUs aren't allowed to run Linpack [SOPEoptimized code is banned], so only CPU scores are taken into place. 24,576 Cores achieve 563.1 TFLOPS in Linpack, and that should be enough to qualify into Top10 of world's most powerful supercomputers. Top500.org will announce the new list of world's most powerful supercomputers during this month. More precisely, during Supercomputing 09 conference held in Portland, Oregon between November 14-20.
