MDGRAPE-3 the Supercomputer

Meet MDGRAPE-3, the super computer system that is made of 201 units equipped with 24 of RIKEN’s MDGRAPE-3 LSI chips for molecular dynamics simulation (total of 4,808 chips), which are connected to 64 parallel servers equipped with 256 of Intel’s Xeon 5000-series cores and 37 parallel servers equipped with 74 Xeon 3.2 GHz cores. The MDGRAPE-3 (Protein Explorer) is designed to perform molecular dynamics simulations of such phenomena as non-bonding interactions between atoms. Japan’s Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (Riken), SGI Japan and Intel announced the development of a supercomputer with a theoretical peak performance of 1 petaflops (one million billion floating point operations per second). [via newlaunches]