supercomputer

A supercomputer in Japan has ended China's brief stay atop the Top500.org list, while the U.S.-built computers took five of the top 10 spots and more than half of the full list.

IBM supercomputer Watson blew away the competition Tuesday night during its Jeopardy showdown with the game show's former champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. The computer was able to answer 13 of the first 15 Jeopardy clues virtually uncontested, with one answer going to Jennings and another problem that all three contestants got wrong. Watson ended the broadcast with $35,734, followed by Rutter at $10,400 and Jennings at $4,800. The competitors will square off again Wednesday night for a final Jeopardy battle.

A White House advisory group has expressed concerns over whether top researchers should focus on building suppercomputers for the Linpack test rather than to undertake important tasks.

After a year of integration work, the Air Force has cut the ribbon on a supercomputer designed to rapidly analyze dense imagery and do real-time surveillance of huge areas.

The University of Warwick has awarded a contract for a new Linux-based High Performance Computing (HPC) facility to OFC.

High-performance computing researchers consider the billion-dollar investment required to usher in the exascale era.

Having reached No. 2 on the Top 500 supercomputer list, China is apparently mounting a sustained challenge to Western dominance in high-performance computing.

High-performance computing (HPC) has almost always required a supercomputer -- one of those room-size monoliths you find at government research labs and universities. And while those systems aren't going away, some of the applications traditionally handled by the biggest of Big Iron are heading to the desktop.

SGI is rolling out what it believes is the first hosted supercomputing service on the market.

1UP has come across a report from the US Department of Defense-owned news source Stars and Stripes stating that the US Air Force has commissioned a supercomputer comprised of 2,000 PlayStation 3s. The $2 million project will also utilize an "off-the-shelf" graphics processor to create a supercomputer "nearly 100,000 times faster than high-end computer processors sold today," according to Stars and Stripes.

Nvidia showed off a new GPU architecture on Wednesday that it hopes will allow it to move beyond gaming to play a greater role in the supercomputing market.

The U.S. has upgraded the supercomputer used to develop weather forecast models, a system so critical to meteorologists that the government has bought a second, identical system as a backup.