You'd Need a 1 Petaflop to Score #20 Rank in Top 500 List

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alidan

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9tflop?

what are we at right now with single gpu alone (can have multi gpus, but just 1 card) is it 5 or 6tflop?
a single high end computer to day has the power of a super computer level computer just 4 years ago.

with that being said, these are the fastest computers that we know about, key word, KNOW ABOUT.

i have no doubt that we don't have faster computers that are just not talked about.
 

stevo777

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"China's Tianhe-1, which shocked the supercomputing world in November 2010 with 4.7 pflops peak performance has already dropped to the number 5 spot on the list."

I don't see what's so shocking since they have tons of money and are just buying US chip tech and slapping it into a giant machine. It would be shocking if it were their technology.
 
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Only a matter of time until technological singularity is reached. I welcome our new robot overlords!
 
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@ alidan

That's only true if you are talking about single precision computing, which is useless in terms of crunching numbers and such. Instead you need double precision and that is much much more expensive, a single ati 7970 with only get you a bit over 700 gigaflops of double precision and a 680 will only net you about 500 gigaflops
 

danielravennest

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[citation][nom]alidan[/nom]9tflop?what are we at right now with single gpu alone (can have multi gpus, but just 1 card) is it 5 or 6tflop?[/citation]

My GTX-260 can crank 500 Gflops. The Radeon 7970 is supposed to be 3.5 Tflops. Those are *single precision* floating point math (32 bit). Scientific calculations are measured in *double precision* (64 bit) operations. On that basis the upcoming Nvidia Kepler card optimized for math instead of graphics does 1 Tflop DP. Still, pump 4 of those babies into a dual processor server board, and you are halfway to being on the 2008 leaderboard.

If you really want your mind blown, that 4 Tflop system beats all of mission control from the Apollo moon landing by *one million times*.

 

A Bad Day

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[citation][nom]danielravennest[/nom]My GTX-260 can crank 500 Gflops. The Radeon 7970 is supposed to be 3.5 Tflops. Those are *single precision* floating point math (32 bit). Scientific calculations are measured in *double precision* (64 bit) operations. On that basis the upcoming Nvidia Kepler card optimized for math instead of graphics does 1 Tflop DP. Still, pump 4 of those babies into a dual processor server board, and you are halfway to being on the 2008 leaderboard.If you really want your mind blown, that 4 Tflop system beats all of mission control from the Apollo moon landing by *one million times*.[/citation]

Actually, an iPhone has more processing power than the computers used to manage the Apollo rockets. That gives you an idea of how efficient NASA was at with using limited computing resources for such complex task...

And how inefficient some software developers are. There is one 2D Flash game that lags on a 3.0 GHz IB processor.
 

Fokissed

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[citation][nom]alidan[/nom]9tflop?what are we at right now with single gpu alone (can have multi gpus, but just 1 card) is it 5 or 6tflop? a single high end computer to day has the power of a super computer level computer just 4 years ago. with that being said, these are the fastest computers that we know about, key word, KNOW ABOUT. i have no doubt that we don't have faster computers that are just not talked about.[/citation]
The article talks about petaflops, not teraflops. Also GPU's cannot (quickly) calculate with the precision needed at these speeds. (double and quad-precision and more)
 

xa3d

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[citation][nom]_TuxUser_[/nom]Of the Top 500 Super Computers only 0.4% runs on MS-windows, around 95% runs Linux.[/citation]

None run Mac OS
 

alcalde

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[citation][nom]greghome[/nom]Some Cray SuperComputers are powered by both AMD Opteron CPUs and Radeon GPUs, so yea, It might be able to play Crysis......just not Linux[/citation]

Actually, Crysis has a Gold rating on the webpage for Linux' WINE compatibility library, so you could play it on Linux. :)
 
What I want to know is how does this compare to classified supercomputers the government has that are unknown to the Top 500? I find it hard to believe the government would advertise their most powerful supercomputer used by the military or secret research labs.
 
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