Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: PetaFLOPS and how it relates to Bitcoin
by
DanielleEber
on 18/06/2013, 11:47:47 UTC
Still it is strange they didn't use GPU in the super computer to boost the more computationally intensive portions.

The top two current supercomputers do, in fact, use APU accelerators: http://www.top500.org/blog/lists/2013/06/press-release/

The Tianhe-2 (~34 PetaFlops) uses 48,000 Intel Xeon Phi co-processors, with 63 cores each.  The Phi is designed similar to a graphics card, but instead of the cores being optimized for graphics pipeline, they are optimized for general purpose math.  Titan (~17.5 Petaflops) uses 256K x Nvidia K20x cards, which uses the same GK-110 graphics chip as their top end consumer card.  The only real difference is the scientific card uses error correcting memory, and the consumer card doesn't, because dropping a few bits here and there in rendering a video game doesn't matter, but in doing scientific problems it does.