Far Eastern battle of the teraflop system hots up

JUST RECENTLY, we reported about some - up to three - very large machines in the Petaflop class coming out in China by 2010. These will be preceded by 'smaller pilots' of 100 TFLOPs scale early next year, prior to the Olympics.

However, South Korea's premier supercomputing institution, KISTI, is well on the way to getting itsr own 150++ TFLOPs system, delivered in the next few months. This was a tough tender where big names like IBM and HP had to fight over what is Asian largest computer in 2007.

One of the purposes of this system, besides research and scientific use, seems to be upstaging the TITECH 'Tsubame' supercomputer, Japan's and Asia's largest machine late last year, which offered close to 90 TFLOPs through a unique combination of over 650 16-core Sun Galaxy 4600 Opteron nodes and Clearspeed FP accelerators.

On the other hand, TITECH might also upgrade their system with Barcelonas later this year, nearly doubling the peak FP throughput. On top of it, looks like Japan will get a 500 TFLOP system next year, too - stay tuned for more updates on this, it's an important step towards Japan having a 10 PFLOP - petaflop - system around 2011. µ