Cray Inc. is building a supercomputer for federally funded scientific research under a contract valued at $188 million that was <a href="http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9218989/IBM_NCSA_abandon_petascale_supercomputer_project">originally won by IBM</a> .
The global race for ever-faster supercomputers is getting a new entry.
The never-ending global push to build ever faster supercomputers took another step today with Cray's announcement that it was awarded a contract from U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory to build a system that could potentially deliver up to 20 petaflops of peak performance, or 20 quadrillion floating operations per second.
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.
Supercomputer manufacturer Cray will be offering the option of using GPUs in its next generation of high-performance computing systems, the company announced Tuesday.
Top manufacturers including Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Cray have announced new high-end servers sporting Intel's 10-core Xeon E7 series of chips, which were announced on Tuesday.
The agency responsible for combating cyber security threats to Australia, the Defence Signals Directorate (DSD), has taken charge of a Cray Inc supercomputer.
Only one Australian supercomputer has made it onto a list of the Top 500 announced at the SC09 forum in US this week.
The U.S. has upgraded the supercomputer used to develop weather forecast models, a system so critical to meteorologists that the government has bought a second, identical system as a backup.
The world's two most powerful computers have not been surpassed in 2009, but the latest edition of the Top 500 supercomputer list shows a new entry in third place and continued dominance from the likes of IBM, Cray, HP and Intel.
About five months after IBM's Roadrunner supercomputer became the fastest computer in the world, Cray Inc.'s XT Jaguar could dethrone it next week.