IBM and Sun show off high performance iron

Both Sun Microsystems are using the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany this week to show off their new petascale servers.

IBM's new Blue Gene/P offer three times the performance of the company's BlueGene/L server, which currently ranks as the world's fastest super computer. It will be capable of processing up to 3 billion petaflops, a measure that is used to indicate three thousand trillion floating point operations per second. Its performance offers the equivalent of that of 100,000 desktop computers, IBM claimed.

The system is likely to top this year's ranking of super computer that will be released later this week at the Dresden tradeshow.

The super computer is shipping as of today. The 3 teraflop configuration features a 216-rack cluster, with each rack containing 4,096 processors for a total of 884,736 CPUs. The processors are grouped in fours into a special Gene/P chip.

The upgrade featured an expansion of the number of processors from two to four, and an upgrade from 700MHz to 850 MHz processors.

Sun Microsystems too claims that is able to surpass the one petaflop mark with its new Constellation System.

The server vendor didn't release any specifics of the system's design, but instead touted the open design of its system as way to make for simpler and less expensive systems.

Super computers target scientific and modelling applications such in weather forecasting, drug testing and gnome mapping. sun

But as prices for these super computers continue to fall, IBM claimed that the company is also starting to see interest from companies in finance and energy. Firms in those segments commonly use computer clusters to predict stock market fluctuations and to run simulations for oil and gas exploration.