By Staff, September 30, 2004
IBM Corp. has claimed unofficial rights to the world's fastest supercomputer. For three years, the fastest supercomputer has been NEC's Earth Simulator in Japan, which can sustain speeds of 35.86 teraflops.
IBM said its still-unfinished BlueGene/L System, named for its ability to model the folding of human proteins, can sustain speeds of 36 teraflops. A teraflop is 1 trillion calculations per second
.
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory plans to install the Blue Gene/L system next year with 130,000 processors and 64 racks, half a tennis court in size. The labs will use it for modeling the behavior and aging of high explosives, astrophysics, cosmology and basic science, lab spokesman Bob Hirschfeld said.
The prototype for which IBM claimed the speed record is located in
Rochester, Minn., has 16,250 processors and takes up eight racks of space.
.
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