World's fastest computer built from video game chips

[Raidou]

Source/ full story:
World's fastest computer built from video game chips (http://technology.newscientist.com/article/dn14095-worlds-fastest-computer-built-from-video-game-chips.html)
17:33 09 June 2008
NewScientist.com news service
New Scientist and Reuters

By using computer chips designed for a video game console, the US Department of Energy has claimed a new record for the fastest computer in the world.

Built from 13,000 of the Cell processors first used in the PlayStation 3 console, teamed up with nearly 7,000 AMD processors designed for desktop computers, the "RoadRunner" can process information at speeds around twice as fast as the previous fastest computer.

RoadRunner recently managed to run 1000 trillion calculations per second, the US Department of Energy said on Monday, compared to the 500 trillion per second of the best IBM BlueGene supercomputer. BlueGene designs have dominated and topped the TOP500 rankings of the world's fastest computers for years, but now look to have lost the top spot.

A trillion calculations per second is known as a teraflop. RoadRunner, at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, US, has become the world's first petaflop computer.


The PS3 console is no longer using the Cell processor anymore rite?

[Sibek]

IBM wanted the Cell to act more as a co-processor made for floating-point calculations, hence why the Cells are matched to AMD Opterons in almost a 2:1 fashion. The AMDs are used to manage interconnects between blades and other Cells onboard.

Sony and Toshiba thought that they could be suitable for other applications including encoding and decoding of High definition digital video. Sony went one step further thinking it could be used as general purpose CPU rather than just a co-processor. It is certainly proving itself more as Sony intended than IBM, surprisingly. As a co-processor, Cell is going to see a lot of competition from Nvidia and ATi/AMD video cards because they are extending their video cards to beyond just video. The only advantage Cell has over GPUs is its support for double-precision (64-bit) floating point numbers. GPUs can only handle 32-bit at the moment. As a comparision between the two speeds check the Folding@Home stats comparision, which can be in some cases 3-5 times faster.:

http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=osstats

In a couple weeks, ATi and Nvidia are going to release new architectures for thier GPUs so the difference can be closer to 10 times!

As for the comment, the PS3 spec is required to use the Cell CPU, otherwise no PS3 games would work if they changed it.

[Atlas]

I'm pretty sure it still does still use it, Raidou. Also: everything else said sounds super rad, but I got kinda lost somewhere around "bellyflop." ;)


^_^

[Nickoten]

Blah blah calculations, let's see some ****ing Crysis benchmarks!



Not serious, of course. I have a hard time imagining a trillion of anything. Still, I'm sure it must have crossed someone's mind to play Counter-Strike on that thing at some point.

[Atlas]

I seriously wonder how good a computer would be at chess with this level of technology. The world's best chess progrom could barely beat top level competetors no less than 10 years ago... I have a feeling hardly anybody(including Kasparov) will even have a chance against these monsters soon.