wile e. coyote
let's see how long this one remains "the fastest". can someone please explain to me whether these are actually computing clusters or a single machine? because the internet combined can be considered a "fast computer" using this jargon?
When Roadrunner is finished in 2008 it will cover 12,000 square feet (1,100 square metres) of floor space at Los Alamos National Laboratory
posted by Abbas Halai at 9:56 AM
1 Comments:
It's a cluster.
There hasn't been a single machine "supercomputer" that ranked comparibly to clusters in well over a decade.
In a cluster of computers the main limitations to solving a problem efficiently are how many operations you can do per unit time and how quickly you can communicate between the computers. While all of the computers on the internet can perform a far greater number of operations per unit time than contemporary clusters, they lack fast networking.
The metric for determining the speed of a "supercomputer" is subject to interpretation. The current candle is the HPL benchmark, which is a linear algebra solver. In order for the algorithm to be solved in parallel memory has to be transfered between processors during the computation. This is typically the case with "distributed" algorithms. Trivially parallel programs like SETI require no communication during the calculation (you just download the intial data and then upload the result of the calculation) and as such are feasible on slow networks.
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