" The brand new "Big Mac" supercomputer at Virginia Tech could be the second most powerful supercomputer on the planet, according to preliminary numbers.
Early benchmarks of Virginia Tech's brand new supercomputer -- which is strung together from 1,100 dual-processor Power Mac G5s -- may vault the machine into second place in the rankings of the worlds' fastest supercomputers, second only to Japan's monstrously big and expensive Earth Simulator.
The Big Mac's final score on the Linpack Benchmark won't be officially revealed until Nov. 17, when the rankings of the Top 500 supercomputer sites are made known at the International Supercomputer Conference.
But Jack Dongarra, one of the compilers of a Top 500 list, said Tuesday that preliminary numbers submitted to him suggest Big Mac could be ranked as high as second place.
"They're getting about 80 percent of the theoretical peak," Dongarra said. "If it holds, and it's unclear if it will, it has the potential to be the world's second most powerful machine."
The Big Mac's theoretical peak is 17.6 teraflops, which would easily put it in second place behind Japan's Earth Simulator, a monster machine composed of more than 5,000 processors operating at 35.6 trillion calculations per second.
Dongarra warned that no machine ever performs at its theoretical peak. But even if the Big Mac comes in at 80 percent of its theoretical limit, it still will make No. 2 on the current list. "
-- William T Goodall Mail : [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web : http://www.wtgab.demon.co.uk Blog : http://radio.weblogs.com/0111221/
"Aerospace is plumbing with the volume turned up." - John Carmack
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