Worlds Fastest Computers

Any of the words top 500 computers can calculate, in a matter of hour or two, more than all the computers together, calculated in the first 50  years of computing. Think what the next 10, 20, 50, or 100 years will bring. Remember what has taken place in the first 65 years of flight. from the Wright Brothers to space travel.

June 20, 2011 (IDG News Service) A Japanese computer has taken first place on the Top 500 supercomputer list, ending China's reign at the top after just six months. At 8.16 petaflops (quadrillion floating-point calculations per second), the K computer is more powerful than the next five systems combined. 

The K computer's performance was measured using 68,544 SPARC64 VIIIfx CPUs each with eight cores, for a total of 548,352 cores, almost twice as many as any other system on the Top500 list. The computer is still under construction, and when it enters service in November 2012 will have more than 80,000 SPARC64 VIIIfx CPUs according to its manufacturer, Fujitsu.Japan's ascension to the top means that the Chinese Tianhe-1A supercomputer, which took the number 1 position in November last year, is now in second spot with its 2.57 petaflops. But China continues to grow the number of systems it has on the list, up from 42 to 62 systems. The change at the top also means that Jaguar, built for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), is bumped down to third place.

The latest iteration of the biannual list was released Monday at the 2011 International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany.Unlike other recent supercomputers, the K computer doesn't use graphics processors or other accelerators. It uses the most power, but is also one of the most energy-efficient systems on the list, according to Top500.org.

The supercomputer is installed at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS) in Kobe. When complete, it is intended to run at over 10 petaflops. This is the first time Japan has had the most powerful supercomputer since the country's Earth Simulator was surpassed by the DOE's IBM BlueGene/L and by Nasa's Columbia in November 2004.

For the first time, all of the top 10 systems achieved performance over 1 petaflop, although they are the only systems on the list that reach that level. The U.S. has five systems in the top 10; Japan and China have two each, and France has one.

The DOE's Roadrunner, the first system to break the petaflop barrier in June 2008, is now in tenth place. The performance of computers on the list is measured using the Linpack benchmark, a set of routines that solve linear equations.

The last system on the new list was at position 262 six months ago, meaning almost 48 percent of the list has changed in the last six months -- and the turnover rate has steadily increased during the last few lists, according to Top500.org, which publishes the list. While performance at the top is advancing by leaps and bounds, movements lower down the list are more modest. The entry point for the top 100 increased to 88.92 teraflops from 75.76 teraflops six months ago.

IBM is the dominant manufacturer on the list with 213 systems in the Top 500, compared to Hewlett-Packard with 153. Intel continues to provide the processors for a majority of the systems on list, followed by AMD and IBM. Intel's Westmere processors are now used by 178 systems, up from 56 systems 6 months ago.

What was the first tape drive?

The following information came from various sources, I was not there.

Magnetic tape was first used for data storage in 1951. The tape device was called UNISERVO and was the main I/O device on the UNIVAC I computer. The effective transfer rate for the UNISERVO was about 7,200 characters per second. The tapes were metal and 1200 feet long (365 meters) and therefore very heavy. (50 pounds)

The UNIVAC I delivered to the U.S. Census Bureau was the first commercial computer to attract widespread public attention. Although manufactured by Remington Rand, the machine often was mistakenly referred to as the "IBM UNIVAC." Remington Rand eventually sold 46 machines at more than $1 million each.F.O.B. factory $750,000 plus $185,000 for a high speed printer.

Speed:	1,905 operations per second
Input/output:	magnetic tape, unityper, printer
Memory size:	1,000 12-digit words in delay lines
Memory type:	delay lines, magnetic tape
Technology:	serial vacuum tubes, delay lines, magnetic tape
Floor space:	943 cubic feet
Cost:	F.O.B. factory $750,000 plus $185,000 for a high speed printer
Project leaders:	J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly

100 years old (IBM - not me!)

The 16 of June 2011 IBM celebrated 100 years of being in business. Very few companies in the world have had that long a life. IBM's impact on civilization is endless. A person, any where in the world, and now in space has their life effected every day, many every minute of their life. The computer part of IBM has only been around for 65 years. No one can even guess what the next 100 years or even 10 years, what IBM and the computer industry will bring to civilization. There will be many great advancements and few other uses that will be regrettable. Can you think of anything electrical /mechanical, other than a electric pencil sharpener, that does not use a computer in it or is not, somewhere in its life been impacted by a computer.

The goal of this blog is to inform. There will items of history of the computer industry, thoughts and pontifications on the industry, COBOL and JAVA tips, new ideas, website you should visit, and answers to interesting questions. The advantage of being an Old Timer in this field is that you can criticize something and not worry about being fired. The worst that can happen is they will not read my blog any more.

Remember there is not much new in this industry that has not been available in some similar form for many years. Tape drives have been around for over 50 years. The first one's were mental tape weighing 50lbs for a reel of tape. Always remember that a new idea is just a repackaging of an old idea so that they can provide material to publish magazines or a have new salesman's selling point.

The latest is the Cloud. It is the old concept of time sharing combined with client/server methods.

Today's website of interest:
http://www.ibm.com/ibm100/us/en/films/wild_ducks.html