U.S. to Build World's Fastest Computer

The US Department of Energy is planning on creating the fastest computer in the world. Ever since the Earth Simulator, US officials have been wanting to build something to beat it. Now is their chance. It is unclear of exactly what they are going to build, but it will involve IBM, SGI, and Cray Inc.

Full story from Associated Press

The supercomputer to be built at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory will be funded over the initial two years by federal grants totaling $50 million.

Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham (news - web sites) was to make the formal announcement in a speech Wednesday, in which he will call development of the world's fastest computer for general science "critical to our nation's competitiveness."

This was not supposed to be announced until Wednesday, but the AP got some information a little early.

I would be interested in a timeline as to when this was going to be finished, and heck, what it is going to look like.

Based on the expected performance of the Cray X1, they don't need those other piddly machines from the Itty Bitty Machine company or from the former occupier of Cray, sgi.

But hey, I am biased. And that would just mean more work for me. Just think of how much fun we could have with a computer that big. Doom anyone?

I heard that on the news this morning. I found it interesting, because I thought Cray folded years ago.

Ah, I remember the days of the big iron... and the Cathouse Crays. Fun stuff.

with 9 years of service, 12 filed patents and 6 issued, I can honestly say that IBM and their overhead politics are not needed in this venture.

I can't wait for Microsoft to bring out an operating system for it, that should slow it down...!!

Originally posted by Byrd
Ah, I remember the days of the big iron... and the Cathouse Crays.

you remember the days? the detroit police still use those for data storage and collection! there are two floors of the police headquarters that are just loaded wall to wall to wall with the monsters. that's unless that's all changed in the past five years... but with the way detroit it, i bet they sold them. for an even older model, and then bought them at a higher price than worth. yay corruption and stupidity in government!

Originally posted by Koka
I can't wait for Microsoft to bring out an operating system for it, that should slow it down...!!

hahah! that or the day it gets turned on they'll have forgotten all the microsoft patches that come out every other day, and it'll get 32 different variations of whatever worm is out at the time.

Rooms full of old IBM mainframes running OS390 with clock speeds slower than your cell phone.

Rooms full of old IBM mainframes running OS390 with clock speeds slower than your cell phone.

Originally posted by Byrd
I heard that on the news this morning. I found it interesting, because I thought Cray folded years ago.

Nope, Cray Research Inc. bought by sgi in 96, then sold to Tera Supercomputing in 2000, changed name to Cray Inc. SGI tried to kill us, but we hung around.

wow ..... but what do you really do with the worlds fastest computer ......mayb solitare... hmm....

Well maybe with the worlds fastest computer the weather guy on TV can get the fricking forcast right.

Its the Department of Energy, could be anything from oil related, winds, ocean currents, nuclear testing (this is what ascii is for). I am just a peon, so I have not been told what it is going to be used for.

But we (the US) needs to have the biggest and best toys.

ORNL has always intrigued me with their thirst for number crunching power and the uses they find for it, everything from automobile crash simulations to nuclear fusion research.
It isn't in operation anymore but the Beowulf cluster they had running was just amazing. While not the most impressive SC on the block, you couldn't beat the price. ZERO! It made me want to get creative with the collection of junk I have in the garage. SETI watch out if I ever get motivated!
The Stone SouperComputer

There is never going to be such thing as the fastest computer... with the rate technology climbs, it's not even worthy of being called something of the such.

Originally posted by crayon
Nope, Cray Research Inc. bought by sgi in 96, then sold to Tera Supercomputing in 2000, changed name to Cray Inc. SGI tried to kill us, but we hung around.

That's awesome! I always had a real fondness for the exotic designs of the Crays. As I understand it, the operating system interface was ...ah... less than intuitive. (which was why I wanted to feed the kid in Jurassic Park to the dinosaurs for toddling up to the Mac and saying "Oh look! It's a Cray! I can hack right in!" ... NOT!)

Looks like the official press release is a little more exciting:

A 100-teraflop (trillions of calculations per second) Cray system at Oak Ridge is planned for 2006, with the potential to grow to 250 teraflops in 2007. Near-term plans call for increasing the capacity of the current Cray X1(TM) supercomputer at ORNL to 20 teraflops in 2004, with a 20-teraflop Red Storm-based system from Cray added in 2005. The systems will be housed in ORNL's new National Leadership Computing Facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

ORNL and Cray up to 250 Teraflops by 2006

Wow, that is exciting. Its not going to be classified, so no nuclear testing on the machine.

More juicy stuff:
n November 2003, ORNL reported that the supercomputer was running challenging applications up to 25 times faster than previously achieved by ORNL on other high-end computing systems, and that it ran a standard climate modeling application 50 percent faster per processor than Japan's Earth Simulator.

2X of the Earth Simulator per processor. WHEE!!!

what if ats had its own setie program that all of are computers worked on what could we find, search for keywords on the internet like ufo,claisified ,secret base,
who nows what we could do.aney thoughts or you can
start a new post on it if you want,