So another supercomputer article without any reference to the operating system. If it would run Windows I bet you would let us know all over the place. And no, it doesn't run a "stripped down version of Linux" but "SuSE Linux Enterprise (SLES 10)" 91% of the top 500 supercomputers in the world run Linux today (www.top500.org)

The pictures of them pulling cables reminds me of the days when I worked for IBM and the 360 Model 65 Computers. They were the top of the line in 1970 and took up about as much room as this one. But my 7 y/o Mac laptop is much more powerful than the 360/65. Furthermore, I have a 1.5 TB external hard drive for my desktop iMac. That little drive contains more disk storage than existed in the entire world in 1968, the year I started with IBM. It makes me eager to see what the next ten years will bring. :)

So we are back to the massive computers in huge rooms. We will be talking about this in the future just like we talk about the first computers from the past.

The BlueGene (L and P) was actually upgraded a couple of times. Increased the speed 700 to 850 if remember correctly, and also double the ram from 500MB to 1GB and then to 2GB. The cooling is actually just regular server room cooling. (Most other super computers need liquid cooling. Check out the Earth simulator...) The cpu speed was limited for cooling purposes. The blueGene is not very good for applications like SETI@Home since SETI@HOME is embarrassingly parallel and requires no inter-processor communication during processing. BlueGene is designed with a very fast network that makes it more suitable for more complex applications.

What is the purpose of this super fast computer, It also seems like the ENIAC as someone said, but I think this doesn't fit in the USS Enterprise to control telet ransportation, so keep working IBM it's got to be smaller. :) Cual es el proposito de esta super computadora, Tambien me parece como la ENIAC como alguien dijo antes, pero no creo que quepa en el USS Enterprise para controlar la teletransportación, asi que sigan trabajando Señores de IBM, tiene que ser mas Pequeña. :)

i would like to play a game of chess against this machine.

wow....IBM server rules..

Wow, great stuff! This is all very interesting. It seems like this computer must suck up thousands of kilowatts of power.

In answer to the distro question. It runs it's own stripped down version of linux. After all it would a shame if kde crashed it. O to all those pointing out how it could be better. You might want to read about in other sources as to why it is as it is. The hardware is configured for a certain class of experiments. Distributed computing will be better for some situations but not all programs can be broke up this way without huge overheads being introduced.

I think You CAN run Crysis on it, It doesnt a big Video Card, It can just cache everything through the normal ram. No worries :-p

On what Linux distro it's running on?

Nice, and it runs Linux, the best OS in the world.

Stupid - I just read here a lot of nonsense... Does it will play Crysis, does it will play Doom... does it run Windows? Come on dudes, are you really that stupid? Do you really think they will play shitty games on it - wasting horrible expensive time? It is for high troughput computing projects, like the well known SETI-Project (http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/) for example, or for one of such projects like the world grid (http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/) have to offer. And honestly what the hell do you want with such a cluster?

Oh please don't tell me they use these for scientific calculations for real. They has these bullshit procedures and accounts and access request for systems like this but in reality the admins just code pr0n dvds on them. What changed over the time that 10 years later only millionaires could afford personal toys like this, today you can put together a 16core lil power station for cheap costs and we should thank asia for that.

That machine is PowerPC, not x86, so it will run neither Vista nor Crysis automatically. That being said, the incredible power of the Jugene supercomputer might be enough to simulate an x86 machine running Vista and Crysis, but another OS would have to be underneath to run the VM. Of course, the GPU would have to be simulated as well. That would be an interesting test, to say the least.

This thing will run the international planned economy and trade right?

I just wet myself!

Wow, I have a dual 450mhz PowerPC supercomputer in my room. I'm using it as a night stand.

Just to let you know its not petaflops/s it should just be petaFLOPS because FLOPS stands for floating operations per second. So the /s is actually incorrect

they use these computers in airports

flops/second is redundant.

I bet they're kicking themselves they didn't talk to you first _ck_. I'm no expert but this probably took a little while to design and build, during which technology inevitably advances...

Does it come with the cup-holder in the front panel like my Acer???

@ares, I'm no expert, but that kind of overhead is part of any supercomputer as far as I'm aware. The power and resources required to manage those nodes is required, whether or not it's abstract or all in the same room. Not to mention, the overhead of having separate sites is probably way higher than any 'waste' here.

...and Vista STILL runs slow on it!!

You could download the internet. All of it.

If you want to impress me, pass the Turing test...

But it's still not a MAC

Please send it to Asian countries as well :)

Neat, In 15 years I will be seeing one that is just as good but the size of my laptop for $6000 at bestbuy. In 20 years I will have bought one just as good for $1000 and it will be like a pad of paper. In 30 years I will have something twice as good implanted into my arm.

I think its used to host some epic CS server.

o i got one of those in my basement

LOL! i want that. that way, it would only take HALF a century to open adobe acrobat pdf!

1,000 4870's can do more processing than the 294,912 cores these guys are using. But to be fair that is 800,000 stream processors. :-)

phi-nix, June 14th, 2009 at 8:29 am "what the hell is it for???" They sell time for it. Say NASA wants to run some CPU intensive takes, interstellar modeling or something, NASA would pay them to run tests for 2hr/2day/a week.

But does it play Doom?

What problems do these computers solve. How are they used. Do they compute how many cars can travel on a bridge without falling in the water.

Didn't it occur to anybody that cluster having some 300K cores and the processing power of "more than 50 000" PC's is kinda shitty ? Or phrased otherwise, that it has "kinda" high overhead ? And that today it would be a lot more lucrative to use a bunch of disconnected nodes & properly distributed algorithms / data paths ? Well, it might be some are unable / unwilling to do it properly, so they are probably the only ones to care. But hey, the biggest & fastest mainframe is here, everyone just drop to your knees and worship this overpriced, energy hungry pile of shit.

Hey fools, likely they started designing the boards a long time ago, thus is why the processor isn't the very latest. Obviously this stuff is not off-the-shelf common motherboard crap you use at home.

woah, thats actual amazing.. i wish i could have it :D

loves it! whens it coming to real world :D?

omg, coolest thing ever, just the thought excites me :|

your all wierd. that thing is a waste of space.

This reminds me of photos of ENIAC which also took up a room. And now a tiny computer like a PICOTux has 150x as much processing power and is the size of an RJ45 connector. I can barely imagine what the next 50 years are going to bring.

WoW. That's insane. What's fastest of whole world and where is it hosted then?

Will it run on windows? :))

what the hell is it for???

I'm sorry, but this has NOTHING on THE GIBSON.