IBM and Sun Microsystems hit 'petaflop' speed

IBM and Sun Microsystems'new supercomputershave broken the "petaflop" speed barrier, the companiessaid separately at theInternational Supercomputer Conference in Dresden, Germany.

A petaflop equals one-quadrillionfloating point operations per second, or 100,000 times fasterthan a home computer.

IBM's Blue Gene/P operates more than three times faster than its forerunner the Blue Gene/L during continuous operation. The company said it can work at speeds up to three petaflops.

Sun's new supercomputer, the Constellation, claims up to 1.7 petaflops of power.

"Blue Gene/P marks the evolution of the most powerful supercomputing platform the world has ever known," said Dave Turek, an IBM vice-president.

"A new group of commercial users will be able to take advantage of its new, simplified programming environment and unrivalled energy efficiency," said Turek.

"We see commercial interest in the Blue Gene supercomputer developing now in energy and finance, for example. This is on course with an adoption cycle from government labs to leading enterprises that we've seen before in the high-performance computing market."

The company says the Blue Gene/Pis seven times more energy efficient than any other supercomputer. Its design uses many small, low-power embedded chips connected through five specialized networks inside the system.

Meanwhile the Sun announcement claims"massive scalability, dramatically reduced complexity and breakthrough economics."

"Sun Constellation System provides customers with the most open HPC [high performance computer] architectures existing in the market today," said Bjorn Andersson, director of HPC and integrated systems for Sun Microsystems.

"Bringing OpenSolaris and other open source software to the forefront of the HPC market, Sun is ushering in a new era of HPC computing."