With an average global broadband connection speed of just 3.1 Mbps, the internet has become one enormous bottleneck for those that send large amounts of data across it. At that speed, a 100 GB file would take around three days to transfer completely, eons too long in a digital era measured by millisecond pings. But a new double-duty satellite launched yesterday could cut that transfer time to just 90 minutes.
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Cray has just fired a nuclear salvo in the supercomputer wars with the launch of its XC30, a 100 petaflop-capable brute that can scale up to one million cores. Developed in conjunction with DARPA, the Cascade-codenamed system uses a new type of architecture called Aries interconnect and Intel Xeon E5-2600 processors to easily leapfrog its recent Titan sibling, the previous speed champ. That puts Cray well ahead of rivals like China’s Tianhe-2, and the company will aim to keep that edge by supercharging future versions with Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors and NVIDIA Tesla GPUs. High-end research centers have placed $100 million worth of orders so far (though oddly, DARPA isn’t one of them yet), and units are already shipping in limited numbers — likely by the eighteen-wheeler-full, from the looks of it.
Cray unleashes 100 petaflop XC30 supercomputer with up to a million Intel Xeon cores originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 08 Nov 2012 10:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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