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Profile Byron Leigh Hatch @ team Carl Sagan
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Message 1041983 - Posted: 14 Oct 2010, 6:29:46 UTC

Silicon Valley’s Solar Innovators Retool to Catch Up to China. Silicon Valley start-ups dreamed of transforming the economics of solar power by reinventing the technology used to make solar panels and deeply cutting the cost of production, attracting billions of dollars in venture capital investment. But as the companies finally begin mass production, they are finding that the economics of the industry have already been transformed by China … read more here ...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/13/business/energy-environment/13solar.html?_r=1
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/13/business/energy-environment/13solar.html?_r=1
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Message 1044427 - Posted: 28 Oct 2010, 17:04:33 UTC

Chinese supercomputer is world’s fastest at 2.5 petaflops

China set to claim supercomputing crown - October 28, 2010

In a potential blow to US national pride the world’s fastest supercomputer is now Chinese, beating the Americans into second place for the first time since 2004 with a machine which is smaller and more energy efficient than its closest US rival.

In the run up to the release of the official list of the top 500 supercomputers next week the Chinese supercomputer, Tianhe-1A, looks certain to occupy the top spot.

Tianhe-1A, which means 'Milky Way', has clocked up 2.5 petaflops – equivalent to roughly two quadrillion (or 2.5 x 1015) calculations every second, making it significantly faster than the Cray Jaguar at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee – the US’s fastest supercomputer - which can only muster a comparatively feeble 2.3 petaflops.

Jack Dongarra, a University of Tennessee computer scientist who maintains the official supercomputer rankings told the New York Times that Tianhe-1A “blows away” the competition. “We don’t close the books until Nov. 1, but I would say it is unlikely we will see a system that is faster,” he said.

Tianhe-1A, a new supercomputer revealed today at HPC 2010 China, has set a new performance record of 2.507 petaflops (quadrillion floating point operations per second), as measured by the LINPACK benchmark, making it the fastest system in China and in the world today, according to an NVIDIA statement.

The supercomputer operates 50% faster than the world’s current top supercomputer, the Cray XT5-HE Jaquar at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which can deliver 1.76 petaflops of sustained performance. The Tianhe-1A operates at one-third the power and at one half the size of the Jagquar, according to NVIDIA.

The system uses 7,168 NVIDIA Tesla M2050 massively parallel graphics processing units (GPUs) and 14,336 multi-core central processing units (CPUs). It would require more than 50,000 CPUs and twice as much floor space to deliver the same performance using CPUs alone. the company says.

Tianhe-1A was designed by the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) in China. The system is housed at National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin and is already fully operational. It will be operated as an open access system to use for large scale scientific computations ...

read more here ...

http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2010/10/china_will_claim_supercomputin.html
http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2010/10/china_will_claim_supercomputin.html
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Message 1044466 - Posted: 28 Oct 2010, 18:34:07 UTC - in response to Message 1044427.  
Last modified: 28 Oct 2010, 18:34:26 UTC

Also an article on MS-NBC

7168 NVidia Cards, 14000 modern CPUs.... 2.5 Petaflops !! Crickey. Ok, who can bust out their calculator and put that in terms of Cobblestones per second ?? How many hours to match the splitting & crunching for 10 years of S@H ?? :-)
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