Fujitsu's supercomputing MONSTER thrashes Top 500 rivals

The Register reports about the fastest numbercruncher today: Fujitsu's K computer with its confirmed 1st place as emperor of the Top 500 supercomputer list with a ball-breaking 10.51 petaflops. The second system is a 2.566 Pflop Tianhe-1A supercomputer at the Chinese National Supercomputing Centre in Tianjin, made by NUDT. Third is a Cray Jaguar at the US Oak Ridge National Laboratory, rated at 1.759 PfLops.

The numbers involved are bizarrely large. The K computer has 17.6PB of storage, mostly Fujitsu Eternus arrays. There are 864 racks, housing 88,128 SPARC64 VIIIfx processors: each one a node in the system. Each processor has 8 cores, running at 12Gflops and 2GHz, connected by a Tofu 6D mesh torus interconnect that can support more than 100,000 nodes. That means a grand total of 705,024 cores. This baby is a monster!