Cray Unveils Its First GPU Supercomputer 76
An anonymous reader writes "Supercomputer giant Cray has lifted the lid on its first GPU offering, bringing it into the realm of top supers like the Chinese Tianhe-1A"
The machine consists of racks of blades, each with eight GPU and CPU pairs (that can even be installed into older machines). It looks like Cray delayed the release of hardware using GPUs to work on a higher level programming environment than is available from other vendors.
Re:Kraken Cray XT5 (Score:5, Informative)
Uh, no you couldn't. The rate of bitcoin creation is fixed (it's about 50 BTCs / 10 mins, for now). If you add more computational time the system will adjust and it'd become proportionally harder to generate them, so the global rate would keep stable.
So despite the 100 thousand-fold increase in mining difficulty in the past 15 months, the network continuously self-adjusts itself to issue one block of Bitcoins about every 10 minutes. The difficulty increase is entirely caused by users competing between themselves to acquire these blocks.
http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=49 [zorinaq.com]
Into the Realm? (Score:4, Informative)
bringing it into the realm of top supers like the Chinese Tianhe-1A
Uh, Cray already has machines in service that blow Tianhe-1A out of the water on real science. Tianhe-1A doesn't even exist anymore. It was a publicity stunt. Cray is already making the top supers. It's others that have to catch up.