All the talk around super computers usually involves talk of Megaflops and pure, blinding speed. Power consumption, while not as popular, also get’s a notable mention as such number crunching powerhouses suck down energy like there’s no tomorrow. But not Kei Hiraki’s Grape-DR “Green” supercomputer.
Located in the Department of Information Science at the University of Tokyo, the Grape-DR super-green-computer is comprised of (64) Intel Core i7 920 processors with 4 Grape-DR accelerator chips. The latter reportedly can achieve 200Megaflops all while sipping down a relatively meager 50 watts of energy. Overall, the Grape-DR can pump out a healthy 815.43 Megaflops.
In the name of happy trees, the Grape-DR is the fastest, “greenest” supercomputer around. But when stacked up against their nature-slaying, we don’t care about bambi brethren, they fall to the bottom of the pack — 500th out of 500. Still, the Grape-DR is a monumental achievement for sure.
- November 16, 2009 10:59 am
Take your current desktop screamer and go for a stroll outside on a bone chilling mid-January mid-west winter. Take your prised rig and drop it in the freshly fallen snow and dump molasses all over it. When you’re done, poor water all over the mass of mess and fire up the leave blower. Got a nice vivid picture yet? That’s roughly the speed of your computer compared to the current champ — the Cray XT5 Super Computer. You may recognize the name as it isn’t a new development but instead an upgraded model.
Claiming this “world’s fastest” title requires some serious processing power. Power that the Cray XT5 (Jaguar) doesn’t lack, clocking in at 1.75petaflops/sec. That’s a lot, — a lot — of flopping. Recent upgrades pushing the standard quad-core set up to a 6-core configuration were enough to muscle the Cray ahead of the old champ dubbed “Roadrunner”. How long will the new champ reign supreme? As we all know, not long at all in this world.
In case you were curious on what the inner workings of a supercomputer looked like or how said computer gets upgrades, jump inside for a handy little video. It’s ok. I know you’re at work trying to look busy while passing the minutes that are dragging into hours….
