IBM Teraflops Into Moscow
I remember the bad old days when the Soviet Union was going to steal our secrets and use them to drop atomic bombs on us. This is better: Moscow State University has purchased an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer for use in research into nanotechnology, new materials, and life sciences.
“As Russia’s leading academic institution, we are very proud that Moscow State University should join the ranks of the world’s leading research organisations to tackle some of the most complex and computer intensive problems known to man-kind – from astrophysics, to molecular modelling,” said Viktor Sadovnichiy, Rector of Moscow State University. “This agreement with IBM heralds a new era of supercomputing in Russia”.
Moscow State University has agreed to buy two racks of the Blue Gene/P system containing 8.192 densely packed microprocessors. The resulting supercomputer is expected to run at 27.8 trillion operations per second (Tflop/s), 2,600 times faster than today’s fastest home PC. Based on the current Top500.org list, the MSU system would today be amongst the top fifty most powerful supercomputers in the world. Blue Gene uses a fraction of the energy of Russia’s other most powerful supercomputers and requires significantly less physical space to house the system.
27 teraflops per second. That's enough to run Vista and Doom 3 with all the shaders on at the same time. Maybe.
“As Russia’s leading academic institution, we are very proud that Moscow State University should join the ranks of the world’s leading research organisations to tackle some of the most complex and computer intensive problems known to man-kind – from astrophysics, to molecular modelling,” said Viktor Sadovnichiy, Rector of Moscow State University. “This agreement with IBM heralds a new era of supercomputing in Russia”.
Moscow State University has agreed to buy two racks of the Blue Gene/P system containing 8.192 densely packed microprocessors. The resulting supercomputer is expected to run at 27.8 trillion operations per second (Tflop/s), 2,600 times faster than today’s fastest home PC. Based on the current Top500.org list, the MSU system would today be amongst the top fifty most powerful supercomputers in the world. Blue Gene uses a fraction of the energy of Russia’s other most powerful supercomputers and requires significantly less physical space to house the system.
27 teraflops per second. That's enough to run Vista and Doom 3 with all the shaders on at the same time. Maybe.
