Horror of horrors-- slightly off-topic disaster has struck in Supercomputerland! You know how excited we were to report that NEC's hoity-toity Earth Simulator in Japan will finally be put in its place when the next TOP500 rankings are released in a couple of weeks? To refresh your memory, the Earth Simulator has topped the performance list for years, now, and by a ridiculously wide margin; on the current list, the Earth Simulator's 35.86 teraflops positively spanks the second-place finisher, Lawrence Livermore's 19.94 teraflops. But all that's about to change, because IBM's PowerPC-packin' BlueGene/L prototype recently scored 36.01 teraflops, which edges ol' Earthy out of the top spot by the whisker of a smidgen. Hooray for PowerPC and all that, right?

But according to faithful viewer Shawn Kucera, Japan and NEC haven't gone down without a fight; The Register reports that they've "trumped US computer makers once again by announcing a new supercomputer that destroys previous performance marks." How much of a performance difference justifies the use of the word "destroys," you ask? Well, the SX-8 (Son of Earth Simulator) apparently has a peak performance of 65 teraflops, compared to its predecessor's 40. Note that this is theoretical "peak" performance, and not an actual measured benchmark; still, using the efficiency of the Earth Simulator as a guideline, when it spits out a real value, the SX-8 ought to score somewhere in the 57 teraflop neighborhood-- which very likely will "destroy" BlueGene/L's performance, since BlueGene/L's peak rating is 45.88 teraflops, which is known in technical terms as "a lot less."

However, there's no reason to finalize your will and start penning a "Goodbye Cruel World" note just yet; interestingly, NEC hasn't released any measured benchmarks from SX-8, so its claimed lead in the teraflop race is still entirely theoretical. And since no scores have been reported, it's also not clear to us that the SX-8 will even qualify for inclusion in the next TOP500 list, so there's a slim chance that BlueGene/L may have six months at the top of the heap anyway. On top of that, The Reg notes that, while SX-8 is 25 percent smaller and consumes 50 percent less power than the Earth Simulator, it's still way behind BlueGene/L when it comes to space and energy efficiency. And last but nowhere near least, let's not forget that the BlueGene/L prototype that snuck past the Earth Simulator's best score is only a fraction of the final planned system; when the whole thing gets finished next year, IBM claims it'll score a whopping 360 teraflops-- well over five times SX-8's current theoretical peak.

So relax; the PowerPC will eventually capture the top spot-- if not next month, then next year. On a side note, we notice that-- according to page 54 of the latest Dongarra Report-- Virginia Tech's G5 cluster has managed to eke out another fifth of a teraflop, racking up 12.25 of 'em with the next TOP500 rankings right around the corner. That's still fifth place, but a darn fine showing for such a low-cost cluster-- and decent bragging rights for the PowerPC and Apple.