IBM may not make PCs any more, but it looks like that’s our loss and not theirs. Supercomputer rankings site
TOP500
has just awarded a system based on its Sequoia design the official
title of world’s fastest computer. The theoretical peak performance of
the new number one is almost twice as quick as the previous incumbent of
the role,
Fujitsu’s K Computer.
With almost one hundred thousand individual IBM Power BQC processors
and over million and a half cores, the new champ is housed at the
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
in the US where it has a slightly sinister task: it’s used by the
National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) for modelling the
performance of nuclear weapons. In other words, it may be technically
faster, since the K Computer is mostly used for things like modelling
climate change and designing solar cells, on a scale of moral
equivalence it’s still our favourite.
Liberal qualms aside, Sequoia is incredible though. It consumes 7.89MW
of power, and has one and a half petabytes of memory. Theoretical peak
performance is 20 petaflops, and it’s been benchmarked running at
16.32petaflops. By comparison, K Computer is theoretically capable of
running at 11petaflops, and its number one position was held with a
benchmark of 10 petaflops.
Here’s some perspective – just 18 months ago, the fastest computer in
the TOP500 list was performing at 2.57 petaflops. For anyone who’s
still unsure about the technical feasibility of something like Google
Glasses, from a server side augmented reality point of view, that’s an
increase of six and a half times in performance in less than two years.
Of course, you need the budget of a nuclear defence program (around
$70bn a year) to develop fast computers that quickly. There aren’t many
computer companies that
sit on that kind of cash.
