The most powerful supercomputer available for general scientific research in the US has doubled its speed, officials said on Friday.
The 54-cabinet Cray XT3 supercomputer at Tennessee's Oak Ridge National Laboratory has been upgraded from 25 teraflops to 54 teraflops, or 54 trillion mathematical calculations per second, they said.
"It is probably the fifth-fastest machine" in the world, said Thomas Zacharia, associate laboratory director. "It is clearly the fastest open science machine in the US today."
PHOTO: AP
The supercomputer, dubbed "Jaguar," was ranked 13th fastest before the upgrade. A list of the 500 most powerful computers in the world is compiled by scientists at the University of Mannheim in Germany, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the University of Tennessee.
"The list is a very simple measure, and it is a good thing, obviously," Zacharia said. "But the real winner in these things are the scientists who are running these machines.
"[They] have been very pleased at the initial performance of this upgraded machine," he said. "It is a terrific scientific instrument."
The overhaul was the first step in a multiyear, nearly US$200 million contract between Seattle-based Cray Inc and the US Department of Energy to increase Oak Ridge's supercomputing capability to 1,000 trillion calculations per second, or one petaflop, by 2009.
The current world leader is the nearly six-times-faster 280.6 teraflop IBM Blue Gene/L deployed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and used for national defense purposes.
The Department of Energy has committed to make Oak Ridge's Jaguar available for unclassified peer-reviewed research at least 80 percent of the time.
DreamWorks Animation is interested in using the machine to develop new algorithms for duplicating the effects of light and shade -- called "ray tracing" -- in 3-D animation, Zacharia said. The results could show up in the company's animated feature films or in medical and occupational training.
Boeing Co is hoping the supercomputer will lead to lighter, more energy-efficient airplanes, and General Atomics Co wants to do fusion energy research, duplicating the power of the sun to light homes.
Another 68 cabinets will be added around November to double the supercomputer's speed again to around 100 teraflops. A year later, the installation of new processors should push capacity to 250 teraflops. The lab is expected to swap out Jaguar for the next-generation Cray supercomputer, currently code-named "Baker," in late 2008. At 1,000 teraflops, Baker would be roughly three times faster than any existing computer in the world.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts