A Taiwanese university has unveiled record-breaking flexible topology switchless and high-density node supercomputers, according to a report Wednesday.
The CK-Star was produced by linking eight computers without switches, breaking the performance efficiency record held by Intel Inc., the Taiwan Today said.
The GS-R22PHL, when equipped with four Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors, can perform at 3.7 teraflops, or 3.7 trillion floating-point operations per second, the world’s highest computing power for a single-node server and comparable to 10 conventional servers.
The CK-Star was developed by Hwang Chi-chuan, director of the Supercomputing Research Center at National Cheng Kung University in Tainan, and Deng Yuefan, a visiting scholar who serves as professor at Stony Brook University in New York and researcher at the National Supercomputer Center in Jinan, mainland China’s Shandong Province.
The GS-R22PHL was jointly created by the university and New Taipei City-based Gigabyte Technology Co.
“Traditional cluster-based supercomputers require switches to control the nodes and inter-nodal communication,” Hwang was quoted as saying. “The drawback is when the number of nodes increases, the switches may become a performance bottleneck. CK-Star does not require switches, thus breaking through this bottleneck and allowing for limitless expansion of computing nodes.”