
Cray XK6 supercomputer smashes petaflop record - shawndumas
http://www.engadget.com/2011/05/25/cray-xk6-supercomputer-smashes-petaflop-record-humbly-calls-its/
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drtse4
I guess they don't know what "general-purpose" means.

More info on that Opteron 6200 here:
[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/24/amd_bulldozer_core_i...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/24/amd_bulldozer_core_isscc/)
32nm, 8 modules of 2 cores each.

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Klinky
"General purpose" in this case means that the computer can run general purpose
code & not highly optimized hardware specific code. The Opteron is an x86 cpu,
so you can run x86 immediately. The Teslas from nVidia will probably operate
using nVidias Cg or OpenCL programming languages.

If OpenCL takes off, the idea is that ones entire application could be
programmed in OpenCL & then run on either x86 or on a GPU. I am guessing, for
now, the Opterons will be in charge of running non-GPU optimal code & feeding
data to the Teslas massively parralel stream processors.

The "general purpose" tag I think is more marketing because if you want to eek
out the last drop of performance from this computer you'll probably need to
write code that takes advantage of knowing the physical underlying
architecture, making your code less portable.

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acangiano
> Sure, IBM's ten petaflop supercomputer may sound impressive, but Cray can do
> you five better

This is the kind of race where everyone wins.

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evantravers
I imagine my professor Dr. Hyatt will be pleased with this.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hyatt>

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codedivine
More correctly, it will smash it in the future. The system isn't shipping yet.

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aphrax
But does it run Crysis? (sorry, couldnt resist)

