When configuration of the K computer is complete in 2012, it is designed to achieve LINPACK performance of 10 petaflops.

ENGADGET: Fujitsu K supercomputer now ranked fastest in the world, dethrones China's Tianhe-1A

This half-build system achieved the world's best LINPACK(2) benchmark performance of 8.162 petaflops (quadrillion floating-point operations per second), to place it at the head of the TOP500 list.

ENGADGET: Fujitsu K supercomputer now ranked fastest in the world, dethrones China's Tianhe-1A

The LINPACK benchmark program, running on the part of the system that employs 68, 544 CPUs installed on the K computer being configured, recorded the world's top performance of 8.162 petaflops.

ENGADGET: Fujitsu K supercomputer now ranked fastest in the world, dethrones China's Tianhe-1A

To test the system's performance at the configuration stage, the K computer's processing speed was measured by the LINPACK benchmark program, placing it on the 37th TOP500 ranking of the world's fastest supercomputers.

ENGADGET: Fujitsu K supercomputer now ranked fastest in the world, dethrones China's Tianhe-1A

He suspects some of the listings were submitted by vendors who ran Linpack (the standard code used to measure supercomputing performance) benchmark before delivering the systems to their customers and then submitted those systems for the list without telling their customers.

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Apart from an occasional stutter while scrolling in the browser, the Epic's performance felt in line with what we should expect of its Hummingbird core -- in other words, it was generally responsive and smooth (Linpack scores ranged between roughly 7.6 and 8.2 MFLOPS).

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