World's Most Powerful x86 Supercomputer Boots Up in Germany

Nerval's Lobster writes "Europe's most powerful supercomputer — and the fourth most powerful in the world — has been officially inaugurated. The SuperMUC, ranked fourth in the June TOP500 supercomputing listing, contains 147,456 cores using Intel Xeon 2.7-GHz, 8-core E5-2680 chips. IBM, which built the supercomputer, stated in a recent press release that the supercomputer actually includes more than 155,000 processor cores. It is located at the Leibniz-Rechenzentrum (Leibniz Supercomputing Centre) in Garching, Germany, near Munich. According to the TOP500 list, the SuperMUC is the world's most powerful X86-based supercomputer. The Department of Energy's 'Sequoia' supercomputer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., the world's [overall] most powerful, relies on 16-core, 1.6-GHz POWER BQC chips."

Re:power to x86

[Joce640k]

I'm pretty sure they'll be running them in x64 mode, not x86.

I'm sure modern Intel CPUs with multiple instruction dispatch and SSE for math instead of x87 will give the i860 a run for its money.

But yeah ... some of those old chips were cool (even if they didn't have a proper divide or sqrt instruction :-)

That Clock Speed Sucks

[barlevg]

I really hate how the focus these days is on more cores, not faster cores.

Not every task is trivially parallelizable, and even with those that are, the speedup you get from running on N cores is always going to be less than Nx.

I'd be much more impressed by a supercomputer running, say, 1/4 as many 4.0 GHz+ processors.

Also: if what you're going for is massively parallelizable tasks, x86 is so last century--GPGPUs are where it's at.