Riken 'K' Supercomputer No 1 in June 2011 Top500

I was greatly surprised by today's news that that Japan's K Supercomputer (the K coming from the chinese character 京 which means 10^16) is the new No 1 machine in the June 2011 Top500 list. I was under the impression that this machine was scheduled to start operating in 2012. But maybe more surprising than this early appearance are two factors: First, its impressive Peak Performance at 8.77 PetaFlops and second, its Linpack rating of 8.16 PF, which translates to a 93% Linpack efficiency! Being used to much lower rates this efficiency is extremely impressive: around 75% efficiency for CPUs and about 50% for GPUs. The 8.16PF rating means that K is more powerful than the next 5 Top500 systems combined.

Interesting is also to remember that this machine was about to be scratched last year by the Japanese government, a move that was only reversed after the Japanese scientific community angrily opposed it.

New Cray machine can scale to a peak of 50 PF

The new Cray XK6 machine, providing up to 70+ TF per cabinet when fitted with M2090 Teslas, can theoretically provide a peak 50 Petaflops with 714 cabinets. The problem? It will still take 38 Megawatts to operate it at max configuration :-)

Source info here

Quantum Computing getting closer?

There was this bit on HPCwire this week about D-Wave Systems which claims to have sold the first quantum computer to the Lockheed Martin corporation. Apparently the system includes a 128 qubit chip. Here's some information. There's also a link to a Nature paper that I assume explains in more detail how the system works.