I read a brief in Slashdot about the completion of the first supercomputer that breaks the petaflop barrier. Its name is MDGRAPE-3 (Molecular Dynamics GRAvity PipE 3), and it’s 3x faster than the current Top500. The machine will be used to protein modeling in the RIKEN’s (Japan’s Institute of Physical and Chemical Research) Genomics Science Center in Yokohama.
The machine has been built during 4 years and costed $9 million. They used application-shaped chips made by Hitachi (they bear the most important computing load) in the special-pourpose units and SGI Altix based in Xeon dual core chips for the 222 CPUs in the host computer.
- An analysis in Newsfactor Magazine Online
- Description of the architecture in RIKEN’s GC web page
- Press release in SGI home (2004)
And, of course, the machine will run linux 