~e; Supercomputers 500

[bc <human@electronetwork.org>]

  [somewhere between the Indy 500 and Forbes 500 of super-
  computing. have been following this for years, (and, likewise,
  the constellations of satellites and space junk in orbit above).
  what interests me is the size-power issue, 2 basketball courts
  with today's processors networked together is mindboggling in
  terms of what such systems are capable of simulating and also
  calculating. and curious about how one interfaces with these
  gargantuan systems (via command-line Unix or special inter-
faces?), and also whether the beowulf/linux clusters are at
  the top. while many of these computers have in the past been
  for scientific modeling of weather and weaponry systems, it
  seems a future is in store when the arts will take their ideas
  into these machines, as Negroponte did at MIT with the archi-
  tectural machine and a mainframe with time-sharing. another
  architect i spoke with has ideas about utilizing these systems,
  not sure if for modeling complex geometeries and-or systems
  analysis and simulation. whatever it is, it seems to be ahead...]


NETSURFER DIGEST
More Signal, Less Noise Volume 07, Issue 41
Thursday, December 06, 2001

This Year's Supercomputer Rankings

The 18th Top500 list of the world's most powerful computers was
recently released. Taking top honors is the IBM ASCI White system,
used by the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory to model nuclear weapons.
That supercomputer covers an area the size of two basketball courts,
is powered by 8,192 copper microprocessors, and contains six trillion
bytes (or 6 TB) of memory with more than 160 TB of hard disk storage
capacity. ASCI White is nearly twice as powerful as number two on the
list, the Terascale Computing System, a machine at the Pittsburgh
Supercomputing Center consisting of 3,000 Compaq Alpha processors.
The list has links to all the machines and a summary of the
ever-increasing trends in supercomputing capacity.
  http://www.top500.org/lists/2001/11/


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