BlueGene/L extended it lead as the world’s fastest supercomputer a month ago but now it seems that it will be surpassed, and quite a lot, by a Japanese supercomputer called MDGrape-3. Located in Riken, Japan, this supercomputer has a calculating power of enormous 1 Petaflop, or 1 000 TFlop/s, which you can compare to BlueGene/L with a performance of 280.6 TFlop/s. In other words MDGrape-3 is over three times as fast as the supercomputer that today tops the list over the world’s fastest supercomputer. MDGrape-3 was unfortunately not ready before the 27th top list was made so they will have to wait until the next list is made official to bring down BlueGene/L from the top. It’s not sure though whether MDGrape-3 will be listed at Top500 as it uses some unusual hardware.
MDGrape-3 has been under development for almost four years and the cost is incredibly really low seen to the enormous performance. About $9 million was the cost to build the supercomputer and this has resulted in a price/performance ratio which no other supercomputer comes close to.
“Those companies supplied the hardware — Hitachi made the central processing unit, or CPU — and absorbed part of the cost of building the machine. One measure of the MDGrape-3’s ultra-efficient computing muscle is its cost per gigaflop (1 billion floating-point calculations per second), which Riken puts at $15. By comparison, BlueGene/L’s is $140 per gigaflop and the Earth Simulator’s $8,000.”
MDGrape-3 is not very large either, it takes up the size of “A large walk in closet” and consumes very little power compared to its competitors. You may wonder how they’ve managed to develop such an “optimal” supercomputer such as MDGrape-3 and the answer is that is has simply been develop for specific tasks. At NewsFactor they’ve published an article about Japan’s new supercomputer and information about its tasks, which can prove to be some very interesting reading. It is pretty clear that BlueGene/L will be on the edge of its seat until we see what MDGrape-3 is capable of at the next Top500 list.
