ACM Technews snippet [1] - Supercomputers

[Steve Jenkin]

link:      http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1120w.html#item7
reference: http://www.bayarea.com/mld/bayarea/news/4553593.htm 

This is to induce 'CPU envy' in all you geeks out there :-)
How fast would this compile the Linux kernel?

"Faster Than Speed of Byte"
       San Jose Mercury News Online (11/19/02); Stober, Dan 

       The NEC Earth Simulator in Japan is currently the world's fastest
       computer, but IBM aims to recapture that title with a $267 million
       contract to build a pair of supercomputers for nuclear weapons modeling
       and other research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. One
       machine, dubbed ASCI Purple, will be comprised of 12,600 IBM Power5
       microprocessors and compute 2.5 times faster than the Earth Simulator,
       while its companion, Blue Gene/L, will feature 130,000 chips and
       compute 400,000 times faster than the average home PC. Physicist
       Bruce Goodwin of the Livermore lab says that ASCI Purple will finally
       give researchers the processing power needed to build a realistic 3D
       model of a detonating hydrogen bomb. The machine will also possess 50
       trillion bytes of temporary memory and 2 petabytes of storage capacity,
       according to IBM. Michael Nelson, IBM's director of Internet technology
       and strategy, is particularly enthusiastic that the Power5 chips used by
       the Livermore supercomputers will start showing up in commercial
       servers next year, and later become available in desktops and perhaps
       video games. He adds that the lab computers and their commercial
       counterparts will be capable of self-healing. Meanwhile, Goodwin notes
       that Blue Gene, which will be primarily dedicated to DNA research and
       weather forecasting, has the potential to become the first true petaflop
       machine. The NEC Earth Simulator holds the No. 1 spot in the most
       recent list of the Top 500 Supercomputer Sites, but machines in U.S.
       weapons labs have claimed second through fifth place.


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Steve Jenkin, Unix Sys Admin
PO Box 48, Kippax, ACT 2615
0412 786 915