News Two records in one day for SGI supercomputer

These figures are just mind boggling. From news.com:

MOFFETT FIELD, Calif.--Even as Silicon Graphics Inc. trumpeted on Tuesday a new speed record with the Columbia supercomputer it built for NASA, CNET News.com has learned, it quietly submitted another, faster result: 51.9 trillion calculations per second.

During the unveiling of the Columbia supercomputer, SGI touted a speed of 42.7 trillion calculations per second, or 42.7 teraflops. That handily beat the machine at the top of a list of the world's 500 fastest machines, NEC's Earth Simulator at 35.9 teraflops, as well as a top challenger, IBM's Blue Gene/L at 36.0 teraflops.

The 42.7 teraflops speed used only 16 of Columbia's 20 servers. That means that 2,048 of the 10,240 Itanium processors in the supercomputer weren't being used--and the unused chips are the newest generation of Itaniums, each with 9MB of high-speed cache memory, SGI Chief Executive Bob Bishop said.

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51.9 trillion calculations per second! I wonder it extrapolated the existence of rice pudding and income tax before anyone managed to turn it off...

No news on 3DMark05 scores.

 

I take it that was with all 20 machines pumping away? Sounds about right. Doesn't the human brain run at something like 100 teraflops?

 

I dont think you can quantify the human brain in exactly the same way. For starters - WHO do you pick to benchmark?

 

The guy from the Steam thread. I think his is going at about 0.2 teraflops.

 

Umm... more like 10000. At least I haven't found a board that can take 512 Xeons yet. I think when the article said "server" it meant something more like the equivalent of all of the DNS servers... But yeah, I bet that's the case.