by Jeffrey Burt, eWeek
Fujitsu’s massive K Computer remains the world’s most powerful supercomputer, being the first system to break through the 10-petaflop (quadrillions of floating point operations per second) barrier. The latest Top500 list of the world’s fastest computers was released Nov. 14 on the opening day of the SC 11 supercomputer show here. The K Computer, which is being installed at the Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan, and is powered by Fujitsu’s latest SPARC64 processors, hit a peak performance of 10.51 petaflops. That the system runs on Fujitsu chips is somewhat unusual: Intel is the top chip vendor on the Top500 list, powering 76.8 percent—or 384—of the supercomputers on the list. Second on the list is fellow x86 chip maker AMD, which powers 63 systems, or 12 percent of the servers on the list. In addition, the K Computer also bucks a growing trend using GPU accelerators from the likes of Nvidia and AMD in hybrid systems to increase computational speed and increasing energy efficiency.
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