A bit on MDGrape-3

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A post on SivaG’s blog about MDGrape-3, Riken’s super-petaflop machine built specifically for molecular interaction modeling

RIKEN’s MDGrape-3 is the first machine to break the petaflop barrier — that’s 1 quadrillion calculations (floating-point operations, to be specific) per second — and it’s three times faster than the currently ranked fastest computer in the world, IBM’s BlueGene/L. But MDGrape-3 is so specialized that it can’t run the software used to officially rank computing speed. What it can do is determine the effect of any chemical compound on one of the most intricate systems in the human body in a couple of seconds.

$9M and four years to build. The post is quick and has a little about how the machine is put together.