By Timothy Prickett Morgan, The Register
For the second time in the past two years, a new supercomputer has taken the top ranking in the Top 500 list of supercomputers – and it does not use a hybrid CPU-GPU architecture. But the question everyone will be asking at the International Super Computing conference in Hamburg, Germany today is whether this is the last hurrah for such monolithic parallel machines and whether the move toward hybrid machines where GPUs or other kinds of coprocessors do most of the work is inevitable.

No one can predict the future, of course, even if they happen to be Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and even if they happen to have just fired up IBM’s “Sequoia” BlueGene/Q beast, which has been put through the Linpack benchmark paces, delivering 16.32 petaflops of sustained performance running across the 1.57 million PowerPC cores inside the box.

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