Petascale

In computing, petascale refers to a computer system capable of reaching performance in excess of one petaflop, i.e. one quadrillion floating point operations per second. The standard benchmark tool is LINPACK and Top500.org is the organisation which tracks the fastest supercomputers. Some uniquely specialized petascale computers do not rank on the Top500 list since they cannot run LINPACK. This makes comparisons to ordinary supercomputers hard.

Petascale can also refer to very large storage systems where the capacity exceeds one petabyte (PB).

1 Applications
2 Development
3 References
4 External links

Applications

Petascale computing will be used to do advanced computations in fields such as weather and climate simulation, nuclear simulations, cosmology, quantum chemistry, lower-level organism brain simulation, and fusion science.

Development

The National Science Foundation is responsible for initiating and funding several petascale computers in the USA, as well as DARPA who gave IBM the contract to develop the petascale PERCS (Productive, Easy-to-use, Reliable Computer System) platform.

China has developed two petascale computers, Nebulae and Tianhe-I.

Other countries, such as Germany and Japan, have plans of their own for petascale computers.

Petascale computers are under development from manufacturers such as Sun Microsystems, Cray, IBM, Dawning, SGI, and NEC.

Active

As of January 2011, these are the only known active petascale computers in the world.

Roadrunner, built by IBM, was the first computer to go petascale, and did so on May 25, 2008, with sustained performance of 1.026 petaflops.
XT5 "Jaguar", built by Cray, was the second, later in 2008. After an update in 2009, its performance reached 1.759 petaflops.^[1]
Nebulae built by Dawning, was the third petascale computer and the first built by China with a performance of 1.271 petaflops in 2010.
Tianhe-1A built by NUDT, at 2.566 petaflops in 2010.
K computer built by Fujitsu, is the fastest supercomputer in the world, at 8.162 petaflops in 2011.

Other

RIKEN MDGRAPE-3 in Japan which went online in 2006 reaches petascale performance but can't run LINPACK, so comparisons to regular supercomputers are hard.

Under construction

IBM Blue Waters -recently ended their partnership
IBM Sequoia
SGI Pleiades which went online in 2008, reaching 600 TFLOPS, but will reach petascale in 2009.
JUGENE, an upgraded Blue Gene/P system at Jülich Research Centre in Germany, operational in mid 2009.^[2]
Tera 100 is built by Bull for the Military Applications Department (DAM) at the French Atomic Energy Authority (CEA). Operational in 2010.^[3]

Platform examples

References

^ National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) (2010). "World's Most Powerful Supercomputer for Science!". NCCS. http://www.nccs.gov/jaguar/. Retrieved 2010-06-26.
^ IBM Press Release (2009-02-10). "New IBM Petaflop Supercomputer at German Forschungszentrum Juelich to Be Europe's Most Powerful". IBM Inc. http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/26657.wss. Retrieved 2010-06-26.
^ Bull Press Release (2008-07-08). "Bull and the CEA sign a collaboration contract for the design and acquisition of a petaflops-scale supercomputer". Groupe Bull. http://www.wcm.bull.com/internet/pr/rend.jsp?DocId=375293&lang=en. Retrieved 2010-06-26.