Researchers build mini-supercomputer

to direct - A team of Dutch researchers has built a supercomputer the size of four pizza boxes. The supercomputer named Little Green Machine II has the computing power of 10,000 PCs and has a power consumption of only about 1 percent of that of a comparable large supercomputer, reports the Dutch Research School for Astronomy (NOVA) Wednesday.

The supercomputer generates a computing capacity of more than 0.2 petaflops, which comes down to 200. 000. 000. 000. 000 calculations per second. The researchers said the supercomputer by connecting four PCs, each with four special graphics cards via a high-speed network. According to project leader Simon Portegies Zwart of Leiden University is the very compact design. '' You could carry it even in a bike. ''

The supercomputer, which is at Leiden University, will be used by researchers in oceanography, computer science, artificial intelligence, algorithms, financial modeling and astronomy. The new supercomputer is about ten times as fast as its predecessor, the Little Green Machine I from 2010. This will retire Wednesday, reports NOVA.

Games Tickets

Unlike his predecessor used the new supercomputer professionalized graphics cards suited for big scientific calculations and not the standard games cards from the computer store. The machine is no longer based on the x86 architecture from Intel, but contains the OpenPower architecture developed by IBM.

According to astronomer Jeroen Bédorf Leiden University is the communication between the cards greatly improved in the past six months. '' As a result we were able to connect multiple cards together into a whole. This technology is essential for building a supercomputer, but not very sensible for playing games. '

For the first tests, the researchers simulated the collision between the Milky Way and the Andromeda Nebula that occurs in about four billion years. A few years ago, the researchers tried the simulation on the Titan computer (17.6 petaflops) in the US Oak Ridge. 'Now we can do these calculations yourself at home,' says Bedorf, 'That's so easy.'