Intel Corp. said Monday it has developed the world’s fastest supercomputer, capable of 1 trillion operations a second, for the Energy Department.
It nearly triples the previous record in computing speed, achieved by Hitachi Ltd. in 1995 with a supercomputer capable of 368 billion operations a second, Intel officials said.
The supercomputer will be used at the government’s Sandia National Laboratory to simulate the performance of nuclear weapons, replacing live tests of weapons.
The supercomputer also will be used to predict weather changes and natural disasters and in other Energy Department projects that require simulation of series of events with massive mathematical calculations, Energy Department officials said.
Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel built the supercomputer using 9,624 standard desktop microprocessors, or Pentium Pro chips, and linking them to process data simultaneously in an architecture the industry calls “massive parallel processing.”
The Energy Department will pay Intel about $50 million for the machine under terms of the contract set in September 1995.
Intel executive vice president Craig Barrett said he believes there was a “reasonable” market for intermediate-sized parallel processing supercomputers.
