The DARPA High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) Program and HPCWire are pleased to announce the first annual HPC Challenge Award Competition (http://www.hpcchallenge.org).

Results submitted March 2 by SGI show that a 64-processor SGI Altix system bested similarly configured servers from IBM, Cray and Sun on five of the HPC Challenge (HPCC) Benchmark's list of eight tests. The HPCC benchmark extends the Linpack benchmark used to determine the well-known Top 500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers.

“The Only Thing Constant Is Change” — Looking back on the last four decades this seems certainly to be true for the market of High-Performance Computing systems (HPC). This market was always characterized by a rapid change of vendors, architectures, technologies and the usage of systems1. Despite all these changes the evolution of performance on a large scale however seems to be a very steady and continuous process.
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The HPC Challenge benchmark is providing a new in-depth analysis of system performance. The HPC Challenge benchmark clearly shows the strength of parallel vector architectures and highly integrated systems with high bandwidth, low latency memory subsystems.
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NEC announced that NEC's supercomputer SX-7 installed in Tohoku University has achieved the world's fastest record in 16 benchmarks among 28 on the new benchmark test in HPC (high performance computing), "HPC Challenge Benchmark".
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