IP: Multi-Teraflops machines

[Dave Farber <farber@cis.upenn.edu>]

From: Jim Gray <gray@MICROSOFT.com>
To: "'Dave Farber'" <farber@cis.upenn.edu>

Dave:
 So I researched it better and here is something that can be forward:
Jim
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IBM's Blue Pacific system at IBM's Poughkeepsie Lab in NY achieved 1.2 TF in
September on a real application http://www.llnl.gov/asci/news/demo_SST.html.
This system has 5,856 processors.
SGI comments in their press release that Blue Pacific has not yet run
LinPack.

SGI
http://www.sgi.com/newsroom/press_releases/1998/november/blue_mountain.html
announced 1.6 TF on a real benchmark (LinPack).  SGI's Blue Mountain is a
6,114 processor system.

These are both amazing numbers.
Prior to these two machines, no one had achieved a TFLOPS on a "real"
application.
Indeed the "Bell Prize" winner for 1998 is only 0.6 TFLOPS so this is a 2x
and 2.7x improvement.

I am still skeptical that we will get to 100 TF by 2004, but these sure are
good first steps!


_____________________________________________________________________
David Farber         
The Alfred Fitler Moore Professor of Telecommunication Systems
University of Pennsylvania 
Home Page: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~farber