I just tought people would be interested in :

CNN.COM

Race for fastest computer heats up


World's fastest computer simulates Earth

NEW YORK (AP) -- In a computing power struggle tinged with national pride, IBM Corp. says it hopes
to regain the title for world's fastest supercomputer from Japan's NEC Corp. in 2004 when Big Blue
delivers a machine that will model nuclear weapons for the U.S. government.

"There's a bit of nationalism involved," said Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee. "We like
to think in the U.S. that we have the most powerful computers. Well, the Japanese have it now."

Japan's NEC jolted the computer world in April when its Earth Simulator, which knits together 5,000
processors to attain a theoretical speed of 40 trillion calculations per second, became the first
machine built outside the United States to top the supercomputer speed list.

The Yokohama, Japan-based Earth Simulator not only took the lead, but did so by trouncing the
then-fastest machine, IBM's ASCI White, by running almost five times as fast.

"It's an exciting time," said Dongarra, who leads the group of researchers that tracks the world's
500 speediest computers, known as the Top500 list. "We went through a period of doldrums. The Earth
Simulator has revived interest in high-power computing."

IBM to build two new supercomputers

At the SuperComputing 2002 conference in Baltimore on Tuesday, U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham
was to announce a $290 million contract with IBM to build two new supercomputers, one of which,
dubbed ASCI Purple, is expected to clock in at 100 teraflops, or trillions of calculations per
second.

Like so many of America's fastest computers, ASCI Purple will be used to simulate the explosions and
decay of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile without resorting to test detonations of the warheads.

In 2005, IBM plans to deliver a second supercomputer to the Department of Energy, dubbed Blue
Gene/Lite, which will run 130,000 processors at a theoretical top speed of 360 teraflops -- more
than triple the speed of ASCI Purple.

Runs on Linux

IBM says Blue Gene/Lite, running the Linux operating system, will tackle research on global climate
change and study the interaction between atmospheric chemistry and pollution.

The "Lite" designation refers to IBM's ongoing Blue Gene supercomputer experiment, where the company
has been researching the techniques behind building a supercomputer that could handle a petaflop --
or a quadrillion calculations -- per second.

Both of the mega-machines will reside at the DOE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in
Livermore, California.

Significantly for IBM, the operating software and the interconnection of ASCI Purple's 12,500
processors are the same basic innards that power its P-Series mainframe computers, said Dave Turek,
IBM's vice president of deep computing. Except that ASCI Purple will harbor two petabytes -- or
quadrillion bytes -- of disk storage, about 30 times the contents of the Library of Congress, Turek
estimated.

Must act like a brain

Japan's Earth Simulator, built by NEC, holds the title as the world's fastest supercomputer.
Japan's Earth Simulator, built by NEC, holds the title as the world's fastest supercomputer.

The tough part, Turek and Dongarra say, is interconnecting the processors so they act like a single
human brain, rather than a collection of cells. IBM said ASCI Purple would approach the brain's
processing power.

"When they get this large it becomes a significant challenge to put these things together," Dongarra
said. "It's a real tour de force in engineering."

All but a few of today's top supercomputers use a parallel processing system that interconnects
thousands of mass-produced microprocessors.

The biggest exception is NEC's Earth Simulator, which uses a "vector parallel" construction of
linked processors, an older method that handles computations one at a time.

Can IBM reclaim 'fastest computer' title?

Whether IBM's ASCI Purple becomes the first machine to knock NEC's Earth Simulator off the block
remains to be seen.

Other companies are working toward the same goal, including Hewlett-Packard Co. -- builder of the
current No. 2 and 3 machines _ Cray Inc., which is designing a pair of alternate systems for the
Department of Energy, and NEC itself, analysts said.

About 90 percent of the top 500 supercomputers are U.S.-made, according to the Top 500 list,
compiled by researchers at University of Mannheim, Germany; the Department of Energy's National
Energy Research Scientific Computing Center in Berkeley, California. and the University of
Tennessee.

For Turek, nationalism is no concern.

"We're international," he said. "For us, every nation is an IBM nation."
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oppps????!!!!!! petaflops ????????in my time Tera ruled , go figure

I am still trying to figure out what the hell a bogomip is.

A wet plainomip? Or maybe a slightly drier marshomip.

Bogomips?

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/mini/BogoMips.html

HTH

So far so good !
Loom would tell ya you're lucky it ain't shikapock or scorzûûm !

Why thank you Thymox. Interesting read. Linus is up to his silly penguin games with this one.

that's why i love LQ , thanks thymox :

"BogoMips are Linus's invention. The kernel (or was it a device driver?) needs a timing loop (the time is too short and/or needs to be too exact for a non-busy-loop method of waiting), which must be calibrated to the processor speed of the machine. Hence, the kernel measures at boot time how fast a certain kind of busy loop runs on a computer. "Bogo" comes from "bogus", i.e, something which is a fake. Hence, the BogoMips value gives some indication of the processor speed, but it is way too unscientific to be called anything but BogoMips. "

you're always learning something other than what you came here for.

I happen to have ( AMD K7/750 - 748.75 Bogomips)

if anyone cares to know (from within thymox link) :

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/mini/BogoMips-3.html