Supercomputer rivals up the ante

Two supercomputer industry heavyweights are squaring up over who makes the fastest machine, while a new contender has thrown its hat into the ring.

Silicon Graphics (SGI) announced its contender for the title, dubbed Blue Mountain, yesterday at the SC98 supercomputing conference in Florida. It comes just two weeks after IBM delivered its Blue Pacific machine to US vice president, Al Gore, who hailed it as "the world's fastest computer".

Both machines are located at US Department of Energy (DoE) laboratories, and form part of the DoE's 'stockpile stewardship' programme, which uses computing methods to test nuclear weapons without actually detonating them.

Both machines boast some pretty impressive specifications. Blue Mountain, which consists of a cluster of 48 commercially available Cray Origin2000 servers, cost $120m and has "the world's most powerful advanced graphics system", according to SGI. IBM's Blue Pacific cost $94m and covers 8,000sq ft. Both contain around 6,000 processors and reach top speeds approaching 4 teraflops (trillion calculations per second).

Meanwhile, a newcomer to the scene has claimed a supercomputing record of its own. Compaq has linked up 72 dual-processor Proliant servers into what it calls the "Kudzu cluster".

The machine, which runs Windows NT, has smashed the record for sorting a terabyte of data - cutting the time taken from 150 minutes to just 50. It achieved the feat at the US government's Sandia Laboratories in New Mexico.