China's Loongson Processor Could Power First Natural-Born Chinese Supercomputer [PopSci]

The People's Republic has unveiled more details on its quest to phase U.S.-made processors from its microchip diet. China's next supercomputer will run purely on Chinese processors, possibly before the end of this year.
China has been developing its own CPUs at the state-run Institute of Computing Technology (ICT) for several years, but iterations of its chip – known as Loongson or 'Dragon Core' – have been incapable of breaking into the elite ranks of supercomputing. China's last supercomputer, the Dawning 5000a, was intended to run on Loongson processors, but was eventually constructed around AMD processors when the ICT couldn't deliver a powerful enough chip quickly enough.

The Loongson 3, under development since 2001, should change all this if the ICT can deliver on its promise. Based on the MIPS architecture, the chips theoretically can be strung in 16-core clusters to perform at extremely high speeds, possibly hitting the petaflop performance mark with just 782 16-core chips. That's one quadrillion operations per second, for those of you keeping score.

Right now, of course, this is all on paper (well, a quad-core chip is in prototype, but the proposed 16-core bad boy is still under development). But authorities in the supercomputing field seem to agree that the chips, running in clusters, can hit the performance marks necessary to create a top-tier supercomputer. This isn't the first time the Chinese have promised a home-grown high-performance supercomputer, but for the first time it looks like they are going to deliver.

[Gizmodo via Technology Review]

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The World's Most Powerful Desktop PC-Sized Supercomputer [Supercomputers]

Six NVIDIA GTX295 dual-GPU cards and one GTX275 single-GPU card add up to a 'massive 12TFLOPS of computing power,' and they fit into the Fastra II's desktop computer-sized case making it smaller and more powerful than the first Fastra supercomputer.
Coming out of the Vision Lab at the University of Antwerp, the FASTRA II is based on gaming hardware and designed with tomography, 'a technique used in medical scanners to create three-dimensional images of the internal organs of patients,' in mind. The Vision Lab team began building the FASTRA and the FASTRA II because tomographical image reconstruction can take up to weeks on an ordinary computer, but in the end they produced this reasonably small 6000 Euro supercomputer. Not too shabby for something that was mainly intended to reduce their processing times.
[Gizmodo via Fastra(Kjoost)]