Nvidia today formally introduced its K20 GPU family, supposedly the highest performing and most efficient accelerators ever built. If you recall, these new GPUs were featured in Titan, the world's fastest supercomputer that was unveiled by the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) a couple of weeks ago.

November 2009 was the last time a United States supercomputer sat on top of the TOP500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers, and thanks to Sequoia, an IBM BlueGene/Q system residing at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the U.S. is back out in front of the pack after it achieved 16.32 petaflop/s on the Linpack benchmark. Over a million and a half cores (1,572,864, to be exact) comprise Sequoia, which TOP500 describes as one of the most energy efficient systems on the list.

When we first heard about San Diego's Gordon supercomputer, we envisioned a spunky thirty-something with a near endless database of PC knowledge and a custom program designed for epic rants. But then we remembered that's our own Gordon Mah Ung. Surprisingly, no one has named a supercomputer after intrepid Deputy Editor (yet), but San Diego did name one after Flash Gordon, an appropriate namesake since it's the world's first supercomputer to rely entirely on flash memory for storage chores.

Nvidia's Tegra ARM CPUs are hitching a ride to Spain where the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) is a developing a new hybrid supercomputer that, for the first time, will combine quad-core Tegra CPUs with high performance Nvidia CUDA GPUs, Nvidia announced. It will be the first large scale system based on this technology, and BSC expects to demonstrate two to five times improvement in energy efficiency compared with today's most efficient systems.