Japanese Supercomputer

This Japanese supercomputer is supposed to be one of the most environmentally-friendly supercomputer arrays available. But is it just me, or is this the ultimate in cable management problems?

This supercomputer system is called the Grape-DR and is composed of 64 pairs of Intel’s Core i7-920 processors and a board mounted with 4 Grape-DR accelerator chips. This accelerator board diminishes the power consumption of the supercomputer five fold! In terms of specs, each Grape-DR accelerator chip kicks out 200 GFLOPS of throughput, while using just 50-watts. That’s less than a lightbulb for you science majors out there.

The system belongs to a Japanese university and research institute, and was ranked first in a list of 500 green supercomputers, beating by 5% IBM’s green supercomputer. For those of you keeping score, the system’s performance per unit power consumption is 815.43 MFLOPS/W – vs. IBM’s 773.38 MFLOPS/W. Take that, IBM!

I don’t know much about supercomputing, but from what I see, it can get quite messy, cable-wise. With all of its intelligence, you’d think it could devise some kind of cable management system.

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