Silicon Graphics Tops IBM
With New Supercomputer
By DON CLARK
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
October 26, 2004 1:10 p.m.
SAN FRANCISCO--Silicon Graphics Inc. hasn't beaten International Business Machines Corp. much in recent years. But for at least a brief moment in history, SGI can claim that its supercomputer is faster than Big Blue's biggest.
A massive SGI system that has been installed at the NASA Ames Research Center has performed in a standard test at a speed of 42.7 trillion "floating-point" operations per second--or teraflops, in computer-industry parlance. That tops IBM's recent test result of 36.01 teraflops for a portion of the huge Blue Gene/L system due to be installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory next year.
Both companies say their machines top the 35.86-teraflop rating of a Japanese machine called Earth Simulator, built by NEC Corp., that took away the U.S. speed crown in 2002.
"We believe we have the world's fastest supercomputer," said Walt Brooks, chief of NASA's advanced supercomputing division.
Besides SGI, the NASA installation carries important symbolism for Intel Corp. The SGI system uses Intel's Itanium 2 microprocessor chip, a product that has failed to gain a wide foothold in commercial computing but is well-suited for technical jobs.
But its not clear how long SGI will be able to boast. When fully installed next year, the Blue Gene/L system is expected to be much larger than Project Columbia, as the NASA system is called. Between now and then, IBM also may be able to tweak the piece of the system it is now operating to get higher test results.
An IBM spokesman said the full system at Lawrence Livermore will perform at 360 teraflops--nearly 10 times faster than the systems running now. "As we continue to develop that system for delivery next year, it is reasonable to expect continued performance improvements," he said. |
