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Wednesday, November 10, 2004
![[Item Permalink]](http://radio.weblogs.com/0112083/images/ur_bullet.gif){kind=small} System X fastest academic supercomputer -- Comment()
Earth Simulator, G5 Cluster Drop In 'Top 500' List: "The November Top 500 supercomputer list has been published at SC2004. Topping the charts is IBM and the US Department of Energy's 'BlueGene/L DD2' beta system, at 70.72 TFlops, followed by NASA's 'Columbia' at 51.87.TFlops. For the first time in several publications of this list, Japan's Earth Simulator is no longer in the number one slot, falling to third. Virginia Tech's 'System X' Xserve G5 cluster, while 20% faster than the original cluster that debuted at number 3 last November, has fallen to number 7 due to the new entries, but remains the fastest supercomputer at an academic institution." Last year I wrote about my impressions of the Apple G5 Dual Supercluster at Virginia Tech. At that time the machine was an amazing job, and it it still. Now they are using special Xserve systems with 2.3 GHz processors, and thus the aggregate speed is faster. The communication network is the same, so the system has the same limitation concerning bandwidth and latency. Is is amazing how cost-efficiently Virginia Tech achieved 12.25 teraflop/s with System X. Of course, PowerPC 970fx is an impressive processor, which explains a lot.
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