NASA’s Columbia Supercomputer Is World’s Fastest -
Press Release -
SlashDot Posting - Silicon Graphics (NYSE: SGI) with NASA today confirmed that NASA’s new Intel® Itanium® 2 processor-based Columbia supercomputer is the most powerful computer in the world. Only days after NASA completed installation of Columbia—and using just 16 of Columbia’s 20 installed systems—the new supercomputer achieved sustained performance of 42.7 trillion calculations per second (teraflops), eclipsing the performance of every supercomputer operating today. Built from SGI® Altix® systems and driven by 10,240 Intel Itanium 2 processors, Columbia’s 16-system result easily tops Japan’s famed Earth Simulator, rated at 35.86 teraflops, and IBM’s recent in-house Blue Gene/L experiment, rated at 36.01 teraflops. Columbia’s record results were achieved running the LINPACK benchmark on 8,192 of the NASA supercomputer’s 10,240 processors. Columbia also achieved an 88 percent efficiency rating on the LINPACK benchmark, the highest efficiency rating ever attained in a LINPACK test on large systems.