Heavyweights of the supercomputing world: Page 6 - Page 6

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CPUs are designed with mass appeal first to make them financially viable, but with the ability for HPC derivatives of the processor to be made. For example, of the top 10 fastest supercomputers in the world as of November 2008, none used processors that were custom-designed for the purpose. Instead, AMD Opterons, Intel Xeons and IBM PowerPCs dominate, all of which have closely related consumer equivalents.

The benefits of consumer volume for supercomputing don't stop with CPUs. Since vector performance is so important to floating-point computation, the burgeoning speed of graphics cards also promises further massive leaps in supercomputing power, particularly when harnessed by distributed computing.

The latter is racking up some rather impressive processing scores. The Folding@ Home project had reached a whopping 4.27 PFLOPS by 14 November 2008, making it the fastest supercomputer in the world by a country mile. Most tellingly, over half of this total was contributed by ATI and Nvidia GPUs. But it's also very significant that 1.7 PFLOPS of that total came from Playstation 3 games consoles. In fact, IBM's Roadrunner, which is currently the fastest standalone supercomputer in the world, uses nearly 13,000 cell processors that are closely related in design to the CPU in a Playstation 3.

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