Forget the arms race, it's all about supremacy in super computers and math skills. I saw a desktop CRAY computer running the simulations for certain DSP solution for Matlab and Simulink, and it got me thinking, well what if I had a business case and I could ask my boss to buy me one? First off though, I would have to clearly explain what is 786 gigaflops, and if it will run Linux.
A teraflop is a measure of a computer's computing speed or processing power, based on the acronym FLOPS - Floating Operations Per Second. A teraflop is a trillion or 10 to the 12th-power flops (Note the use of the plural, no need for an additional "s"), available on the market for most affordable parallel computing solutions. And of course, within the realm of possibility or imagination is a computer capable of petaflops, a thousand teraflops or a quadrillion (thousand trillion) flops.
Supercomputers are capable of so many amazing tasks, previously to discover new elements, detect dark matter components. simulate nuclear chain reaction or particle collisions. At present, they can model climate change, crack codes, model protein behaviours and drug reactions. Therefore it's obvious that the top buyers include the biosciences, computer aided engineering and defense industries. Hewlett-Packard, Dell and IBM are all competitors in the market. This CRAY system came out in 2008, so I'm a bit 2000-and-late but in this world, by the time you've already built and deployed the number one system, someone has already imagined something 20 times better.
Canada
As of Nov 2011, Canada did not have a system listed within the public top 500 supercomputer list. Boo.
However we do see Supercomputers on the trading floor at the Toronto Stock Exchange (perhaps the server room) called electronic traders. Math geeks design the algorithms (users input parameters like selling or holding thresholds) or dark pools (when trades have to be hidden from algorithms).
Computation resource allocation on the SciNet, another system at the University of Toronto is very competitive though. The Compute Canada's Resource Allocation Committees are in charge of connecting researchers with computational and personnel resources to run calculations for biomedical research, climate change modeling and even galaxy formation simulations.
Japan
Japan ranks number one. As of Nov 2011, the K Computer, based at the Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science in Japan was the first to clear 10 petaflops, beating its own record. Hardware includes 705,024 Fujitsu Sparc64 processor cores.
Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-57324194-264/japanese-supercomputer-first-to-clear-10-petaflops/#ixzz1mwp3L6yU
US
The Blue Gen/L can do 0.5 Quadrillion operations per second, the most powerful in 2005-2008. The Blue Gen is deployed at Livermore, San Francisco where 263 supercomputers from the Top 500 list also reside.
The up and coming Sequoia is being built by IBM, for end 2012, capable of 20 quadrillion operations per second, that's 20 petaflops. The main challenges being to write software to run across all the chips amounting to 1.6 million processors 96 racks of 32 slim servers
I like the supercomputer made from many old model Sony PS3's in parallel used by the US Air Force for satellite imagery analysis, demonstrated years ago. Many researchers have already done the same though this is no longer possible with newer generation PS3.
China
In Nov 2010 China was number one with the Tianhe-1A doing 2.5 Quadrillion operations per second
by Dawning Information Industry Ltd. Tianhue means "The Milky Way", although surpassed within six weeks by Japan. Another amazing fact, China owns 74 of the 500 biggest supercomputers in the world
By 2020 the Chinese have something in the works to rival 500x Sequoia and 8x power of Tianhe
Cisco
Anyway it's not supercomputing but here is the fastest Cisco switch ever. http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/switches/ps5718/ps6021/product_data_sheet0900aecd8017a72e.html I'm bringing this up simply because one has to consider connectivity to these super computers and all the glorious applications.
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