But not the scientists at Los Alamos National Labs. They used the idea to build a petaflop computer named Roadrunner the world s fastest. Here s how. trillion floating point operations per second Fine grained simulation of aging nuclear weapons is the new computer s ultimate gig. They couldn t just string PS s together who d believe the results Besides it s American to want something better and way faster. First they built a new Cell Broadband Engine The new version of the PS chip called a PowerXCell i Processor features x faster double precision floating point and over GB sec of memory bandwidth. That is the building block of a new and really honking compute node. PowerXCell i photo courtesy of IBM Systems and Technology Group Each compute node consists of dual core AMD Opterons and PowerXCell i s. Each Opteron has a fast connection to PowerXCells enabling a theoretical x boost in floating point performance over a stock Opteron. No one mentioned how much RAM they gave each PowerXCell but the chip can address GB of RAM so each compute node could easily support GB of RAM GB GB or more on the Opterons . With over GB sec of memory bandwidth. We ll take of them That s about how many nodes are in the completed Roadrunner. They re interconnected by a standard for HPC clusters Infiniband DDR network. Infiniband is a switched fabric interconnect featuring microsecond latencies and data rates of GB sec for x DDR. That s about as much as you can get out of a PCI Express x bus anyway. Software is problem The hardware specs are drool worthy but without the right codes it is just an expensive furnace. As the best single article on Roadrunner I found explains For the Cell the programmer must know exactly what s needed to do one computation and then specify that the necessary instructions and data for that one computation are fetched from the Cell s off chip memory in a single step. . . . IBM s Peter Hoftstee the Cell s chief architect describes this process as a shopping list approach likening off chip memory to Home Depot. You save time if you get all the supplies in one trip rather than making multiple trips for each piece just when you need it. The programmers optimized codes for a variety of applications including radiation and neutron transport molecular dynamics fluid turbulence and plasma behavior. With the optimized codes they got a real world x performance boost over the standard Opterons. The Storage Bits take Back when I was hawking vector processors a Gigaflop was considered respectable. A couple of decades later and we have a machine million times faster. Cool We won t be able to shrink feature sizes forever though so architecture and bandwidth will be key to further speed ups. Hopefully that time is still a few decades away. Comments welcome of course. posted by Robin Harris June am Previous Post Intel s tiny new flash drives Last posts PS chip powers world s fastest computer Intel s tiny new flash drives Mac Time Machine backup for the rest of us Intel Micron intro nm flash chip Put some IT pros in jail High end disks dead in years If hackers don t get you maybe Google will Gbit drives coming Mac online backup that works Apple s worst hardware flaws and how to fix them more Posts Archives WordPress Mobile Edition available at alexking.org. powered by WordPress . Brawl Wii . gift card Free shipping Amazon.com is selling Super Smash Bros. Brawl for . . MSRP . . Includes bonus Amazon.com gift card. Free shipping. Vote s Rainbow Six Vegas PS . Free shipping Amazon.com is selling Rainbow Six Vegas for the PS for . . MSRP . . Free shipping. Vote s The Chronicles of Narnia Prince Caspian PS . Free shipping Amazon.com is selling The Chronicles of Narnia Prince Caspian for the PS for . . MSRP . . Free shipping. Vote s The Chronicles of Narnia Prince Caspian Xbox . Free shipping Amazon.com is selling The Chronicles of Narnia Prince Caspian for PS for . . MSRP . . Free shipping. Vote s RSS integration by RSSinclude Amazon.com Widgets news.punchjump.com Web Wii outsells Xbox PS combined in U.S. sales The motion sensitive marvel takes the top spot in hardware sales for Apr. . . PDT About Punch Jump Punch Jump Crew Terms of Use Privacy Policy Advertise Jobs Contact Us According to a report by the Australian Consumers Association s Choice publication leaving your PS on when you re not gaming can cost you US a year in electricity bills. That s the same as five refrigerators and serves as an important reminder to turn off video game systems after use . Before Microsoft fans get too smug though the Xbox comes in at a close second place. The PS while on and running a game consumes some . kWh weekly equivalent to around US . . When on but idle it uses almost as much sapping . kWh or US . . When the machine was off with the back switch on power usage plummeted to . kWh or US . a week. In comparison the Xbox used up kWh per week in power when on and running a game about US . in real money. When on but idle the figure was slightly reduced to . kWh or around US . and when off used up only . kWh or US . a week. Unsurprisingly the Nintendo Wii used the least power under percent of that needed for the PS . Playing a game it uses . kWh costing US . a week and on but idle it drained . kWh or US . . When the console was switched off but WiiConnect remained on this dropped to . kWh costing US . a week. When WiiConnect was also turned off this figure became . kWh or US . a week. The report also found that the plasma TV set tested was also a power hungry device and required over four times as much power as a traditional CRT analog TV set. Talkback There are currently no comments for this story. To post comments you need to become a member. It s FREE. 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