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A supercomputer built by Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University from 1,100 dual-processor Macintosh G5 PCs looks likely to rank with the five fastest machines in the world, despite costing a relative pittance.

In preliminary performance tests carried out on 2,112 of the system’s 2,200 processors, the so-called "Big Mac" cluster achieved 8.1 teraflops, or trillions of operations per second, according to figures published on Wednesday. The system is still being tuned, and final results won’t be announced until next month, but the performance figure would place the Big Mac at No. 4 on the list of the world’s fastest 500 supercomputers.

The figures are remarkable partly because Macintosh hardware has long been absent from the top 500 list, but also because of the Big Mac’s cost. In a world where the top machines traditionally cost $100 million to $250 million, and take several years to build, the Mac-based system cost just over $5 million, and was put together in about a month.

Virginia Tech said the final performance figure could be much higher. The 8.1-teraflop figure is only 48 percent of the system’s theoretical peak of 16.8 teraflops, and it may be possible to squeeze more efficiency out of the cluster.

Neuroscientists are to build the most detailed model of the human brain with the help of an IBM supercomputer.

Experts at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland, will spend the next two years creating a 3D simulation of the neocortex.

This is the part of the brain thought to be responsible for language, learning, memory and complex thought.

The researchers believe the project will give them fresh insights into the most remarkable organ in the body.

"Modelling the brain at the cellular level is a massive undertaking because of the hundreds of thousands of parameters that need to be taken into account," said Henry Markram, the EPFL professor leading the project.

The Swiss scientist and his colleagues will have at their disposal an IBM’s eServer Blue Gene supercomputer.

Up the pace

The system to be installed at their EPFL lab will take up the floor space of about four refrigerators, and will have a peak processing speed of at least 22.8 trillion floating-point operations per second (22.8 teraflops), making it one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world.

Five years ago, no supercomputer in the world was capable of more than one teraflop.

The effort has been dubbed the Blue Brain Project. It is a daunting undertaking given the myriad of electro-chemical connections that must be mapped.

By using a supercomputer to run experiments in real time, Professor Markram hopes to accelerate substantially the pace of brain research.

"With an accurate computer-based model of the brain much of the pre-testing and planning normally required for a major experiment could be done ‘in silico’ rather than in the laboratory.

"With certain simulations we anticipate that a full day’s worth of ‘wet lab’ research could be done in a matter of seconds on Blue Gene."

The Blue Brain Project will start with the neocortex but scientists expect eventually to produced a 3D model of the entire brain.

Researchers expect not only to get a better understanding of how the organ is wired up but also to use that "atlas" of neurocircuitry to probe how the brain functions - and malfunctions.

The scientists say the project could lead, for example, to new ideas on how psychiatric disorders develop - illnesses such as autism, schizophrenia, and depression.

Supercomputers have recently become a major tool in a range of advanced biological applications, from helping to piece together fragmented DNA information to the design of new drug molecules.

IBM building world’s fastest supercomputer using Opteron and Cell processors

One reason there’s so much fuss (and delay) over the upcoming PlayStation 3 platform is the fact that it sports those new Cell processors jointly developed with Sony and Toshiba. Now those Cell procs are about to find themselves pumping away at the heart of a new $35 million supercomputer for Los Alamos National Laboratory. But this won’t be just supercomputer mind you, IBM is hoping to reclaim the title of the world’s fastest once completed in 2007. Dubbed Roadrunner, ACME IBM plans to jump from 280-teraflops to a full petaflop performance by combining AMD Opteron blade servers and Cell-based accelerator systems. A performance threshold achieved earlier this year by NEC’s MDGrape-3, the supercomputer behind new pharmaceutical drugs and the curious taste and powerful punch of Mad Dog’s 20/20 Red Grape Malt beverage. Mmm, grape.

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