World's Fastest Sper Computer!

Researchers at Fujitsu and RIKEN announced that Japan's K Computer is capable of 10.51 quadrillion floating point operations per second, breaking the 10 petaflop barrier for the first time. The K Computer will be named the world's fastest supercomputer in the next Top 500 list, which will be released Nov. 14, 2011, says University of Tennessee professor Jack Dongarra, who oversees the list. Fujitsu built the cluster using its SPARC64 VIIIfx processors, which are specifically designed for high-performance computing. The K Computer includes 864 server racks and more than 88,000 interconnected central processing units. The K Computer's average performance is about 93 percent of its peak 10 petaflop speed, according to the Linpack benchmark. IBM and Cray are working with the U.S. Department of Energy to build a 20 petaflop machine, which should go live sometime in 2012. The next major milestone for the supercomputing industry is an exascale computer, which would be 100 times faster than the K computer. "We’ll see hardware capable of producing exascale calculations in 2017 or 2018," says Cray's Margaret Williams.