SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 18 - A global race is under way to reach the next milestone in supercomputer performance, many times the speed of today's most powerful machines. And beyond the customary rivalry in the field between the United States and Japan, there is a new entrant - China - eager to showcase its arrival as an economic powerhouse.

It's interesting that China has entered this arena.

A New Arms Race to Build the World's Mightiest Computer - New York Times

Supercomputers are cool.

After two and a half years at the top of a list of the world's fastest supercomputers, NEC's Earth Simulator has finally been dethroned: IBM's Blue Gene/L officially is the new king of the hill.

The Blue Gene/L succession, while expected, reflects IBM's sustained push in recent years to expand its expertise from business computers into high-performance technical computing. On the newest incarnation of the Top500 list, updated twice a year, IBM has 216 systems, which account for 49.4 percent of list members' collective performance.

The ascendance also highlights the rise of Linux, the open-source operating system that Blue Gene/L runs and that IBM helped to champion. The new No. 2 system, Silicon Graphics' Columbia, also uses Linux.

Blue Gene/L performed 70.7 trillion calculations per second, or teraflops, nearly twice the 35.9 teraflops of Earth Simulator. And as expected, Columbia was clocked at 51.9 teraflops. IBM's new MareNostrum, at 20.5 teraflops, arrived in fourth place.

Blue Gene, Linux top supercomputing list | CNET News.com

] NOEL Sharkey is in the mood to debunk a few myths.
]
] The 56-year-old professor of computer science at
] Sheffield University is at the forefront of robotic
] technology in this country and there's a few things he
] wants to get off his chest.
]
] "Everybody wants to hear that robots are going to take
] over the world but it's not going to happen," he says.
]
] "You get a lot of scientists, particularly American
] scientists, saying that robotics is about at the level of
] the rat at the moment, I would say it's not anywhere near
] even a simple bacteria."

It's good to have pessimists.

Yorkshire Post Today: News, Sport, Jobs, Property, Cars, Entertainments & More

] Researchers at the Bayesian Inspired Brain and Artefacts
] (BIBA) project are using a novel application of Bayesian
] reasoning to design artefacts (objects produced or shaped
] by human craft) that can learn to act rationally with
] incomplete information.

This seems like a promising approach to building robust intelligent artifacts.

IST Results - Building thinking robotics for the real world

] Using an international grid of about 240,000 networked
] computers, researchers have discovered the largest known
] prime number.
]
] The number, expressed as 2 to the 24,036,583th power
] minus 1, has 7,235,733 decimal digits. Discovered May 15,
] the number is nearly a million digits larger than the
] previous largest prime number, which was itself
] discovered last December.
...

] Of the 240,000 computers networked onto the grid, Woltman says
] 20,000 to 40,000 computers are active at any one time. The grid
] covers virtually every time zone in the world.
]
] Woltman estimates that the grid, which is comprised of businesses,
] universities and home users, does 20 trillion calculations a
] second.

If the GIMP network were executing the Linpack benchmark at this
rate, it would be number 2 on the Top 500 supercomputers list.

Giant Grid Discovers Largest Known Prime Number

] LOS ALAMOS, N.M. -- Scientists
] at Los Alamos National Laboratory are trying to predict
] how supercomputers of the future will perform.
]
] The research arm of the Department of Defense has awarded
] a three-year, $4.2-million (U.S.) grant for the lab's
] computer and computational sciences division to
] performance analysis and modelling, create software tools
] and evaluate networks.

Goal: by 2008 the design for a 1 petaflop supercomputer.

Globetechnology

The significance here is the steep drop in computing resources available for solving large problems. How many problems become economically tractable if there were a bunch of computers like this available to industry and academia?

University To Offer Supercomputer In A Box

] The brand new "Big Mac" supercomputer at Virginia Tech
] could be the second most powerful supercomputer on the
] planet, according to preliminary numbers.
]
] Early benchmarks of Virginia Tech's brand new
] supercomputer -- which is strung together from 1,100
] dual-processor Power Mac G5s -- may vault the machine
] into second place in the rankings of the worlds' fastest
] supercomputers, second only to Japan's monstrously big
] and expensive Earth Simulator.

It was relatively inexpensive, too. $5.2 million. Theoretical peak performance is 17.6 teraflops. The developers are hoping to achieve 80% of that performance.

Update on TechWeb at http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB20031105S0011

The significance here is the steep drop in computing resources available for solving large problems. How many problems become economically tractable if there were a bunch of computers like this available to industry and academia?

Wired News: Mac Supercomputer: Fast, Cheap

] CMU professor wins award for program that aids
] decision-making process
]
] Monday, August 11, 2003
]
] By Byron Spice, Post-Gazette Science Editor

This Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article is somewhat soft and confused, but is an excellent teaser to lead one to Tuomas Sandholm's page at CMU, http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~sandholm/ Sandholm has done some amazing research in the application of economic theory to agent-based systems.

CMU professor wins award for program that aids decision-making process

] Los Alamos National Laboratory announced plans with
] system builder Linux Networx to build a Linux cluster
] supercomputer, using AMD Opteron processors, that will
] rank among the top 10 of the world's fastest computers
] and will facilitate nuclear weapons research.

Theoretical peak performance 11.26 teraflops (YMMV). US$10 million, 1,408 dual-processor nodes.

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