World's most powerful supercomputer goes online

[Jack Lloyd]

On Fri, Aug 31, 2007 at 06:23:57PM +1200, Peter Gutmann wrote:
> 128K CPU cores.  Using the figures from Valve's online survey,
> http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html, for which the typical machine
> has a 2.3 - 3.3 GHz single core CPU with about 1GB of RAM, the Storm cluster
> has the equivalent of 1-10M (approximately) 2.8 GHz P4s with 1-10 petabytes of
> RAM (BlueGene/L has a paltry 32 terabytes).

The Steam survey is going to overestimate the power of the average
machine because it is only sampling machines which are capable of
playing Half-Life 2 (or other equally resource intensive games). The
recommended machine for Half-Life 2 is a 2.4 GHz CPU with 512 Mbytes
RAM. No surprise that most of the machines surveyed hit that minimum.

As for "most powerful supercomputer" - that ignores that the
interconnect used (the Internet) is going to be 2 to 4 orders of
magnitude slower in bandwidth and latency than that used in any modern
supercomputer.

-Jack

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