Powerful XK6 Pushes 50 Petaflops of Processing Power
Powerful XK6 Pushes 50 Petaflops of Processing Power
Posted 05/24/2011 at 1:37pm
| by Brad Chacos
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Petaflops. Something about the word brings a smile to our faces – maybe because it sounds like a vaguely dirty word? But the term refers to processing power rather than a part of the human anatomy. A petaflop computer performs 1,000 trillion operations per second, and the new XK6 supercomputer announced today by Cray promises to scale up to 50 petaflops. Now, math isn't one of our strong points, but we're pretty sure we'd be able to rock a pretty awesome game of Dwarf Fortress on one of those puppies.
According to Brier Dudley of the Seattle Times, Cray created the mind-blowingly fast GPU-equipped supercomputer by combining AMD x86 processors with Nvidia graphics processors. The Swiss National Supercomputing Center is set to snatch the first one off the assembly line, upgrading its existing XE6M system, which is also produced by Cray. Professor Thomas Schulthess, the director for the Center, said he couldn't wait to get his hands on the machine, calling it "the first general-purpose supercomputer based on GPU technology."
The XK6 will cost between $500,000 and $1 million at launch, depending on the setup.
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NerdNurse
May 27, 2011 at 6:41am
Way to name drop Dorf Fort. I figure with 50 Petaflops you'd be able to not only generate a random world, but a random solar system complete with orbital variances, multiple asteroid belts, and a recurring comet that would have crazy portents about it. Of course, you'd have to mine your world to build an orbital platform complete with space elevator; eventually mining the planets out into a massive system-wide omnistructure...
I'd play Dwarfson Sphere. Hell yeah.
Brad Chacos
May 24, 2011 at 6:02pm
You can't even imagine the human brain working at 100%... unless you've seen Darren Aronofsky's "Pi", I guess. In any case, it's scary.
AndrewEgel
May 24, 2011 at 2:14pm
Just to add to the "great-ness" of a flop - flop means floating point operation (fractions, decimals, etc), which takes much longer to do (on a CPU/GPU) over integer operations (whole numbers) on the binary level. So getting that high on the flop scale really is a giant acievement in enginnering.
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