Supercomputer Sets Petaflop Pace

9/6/2008

Courtesy of BBC News

A supercomputer built with components designed for the Sony PlayStation 3 has set a new computing milestone.

The IBM machine, codenamed Roadrunner, has been shown to run at "petaflop speeds", the equivalent of one thousand trillion calculations per second. The benchmark means the computer is twice as nimble as the current world's fastest machine, also built by IBM. It will be installed at a US government laboratory later this year where it will monitor the US nuclear stockpile. It will also be used for research into astronomy, genomics and climate change.

"Roadrunner will enable us to tackle problems we couldn't tackle before," said John Morrison, leader of the high-performance computing division at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in California, where it will be installed.

"We'll be able to run a different level of problems. We'll be able to do calculations that we wouldn't even consider before."

Chip stacks

The current fastest supercomputer is IBM's Blue Gene/L, also at LANL.

It is used in the US Department of Energy's's Stockpile Stewardship Program, which oversees the country's nuclear weapons. 
It was recently upgraded and now runs at a speed of 478.2 teraflops (trillions of calculations per second), using 212, 992 processors.

By comparison, Roadrunner will use less than 20,000 chips. This is because the new computer is a so-called "hybrid" design, using both conventional supercomputer processors and the powerful "cell" chip designed for the PS3.

The eight-core chip runs at speeds greater than 4 GHz and was designed by a consortium of companies including IBM, Sony and Toshiba. It has been modified for Roadrunner to allow it to handle a greater bandwidth of data and to carry out more specialist calculations. Roadrunner packs more than 12,000 of the processors - known as "accelerators" - on top of nearly 7,000 standard processors. The standard processors are used too handle the general computation needed to keep the machine running, whilst the cells are left to crunch vast swathes of unstructured data.

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Apple Expected to Unveil iPhone 2

9/6/2008

Courtesy of BBC News

A supercomputer built with components designed for the Sony PlayStation 3 has set a new computing milestone.

The IBM machine, codenamed Roadrunner, has been shown to run at "petaflop speeds", the equivalent of one thousand trillion calculations per second. The benchmark means the computer is twice as nimble as the current world's fastest machine, also built by IBM. It will be installed at a US government laboratory later this year where it will monitor the US nuclear stockpile. It will also be used for research into astronomy, genomics and climate change.

"Roadrunner will enable us to tackle problems we couldn't tackle before," said John Morrison, leader of the high-performance computing division at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in California, where it will be installed.

"We'll be able to run a different level of problems. We'll be able to do calculations that we wouldn't even consider before."

Chip stacks

The current fastest supercomputer is IBM's Blue Gene/L, also at LANL.

It is used in the US Department of Energy's's Stockpile Stewardship Program, which oversees the country's nuclear weapons. 
It was recently upgraded and now runs at a speed of 478.2 teraflops (trillions of calculations per second), using 212, 992 processors.

By comparison, Roadrunner will use less than 20,000 chips. This is because the new computer is a so-called "hybrid" design, using both conventional supercomputer processors and the powerful "cell" chip designed for the PS3.

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SlingPlayer Wants to Come to the 3G iPhone

8/6/2008

Courtesy of Crave

Sling showed us a brief demonstration of what the company's mobile application, SlingPlayer, looks like on a jailbroken first-generation iPhone. It's merely a proof of concept, the company says, to demonstrate how superduperexcited it is to get started on an actual product.

This is, of course, all assuming that Steve Jobs announces the 3G iPhone Monday at the opening of Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference, which is all but assured at this point.

SlingPlayer is an application that allows users to stream video directly from a Slingbox to a mobile device. The bandwidth to show a high-quality video stream necessitates a device on a 3G wireless service, which is why the company has had to wait for the next-gen version of the iPhone. Sling already makes the SlingPlayer Mobile available on Windows Mobile, Palm OS, and Symbian phones, with RIM's BlackBerry on the way.

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