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Birth Of A Terascale Baby
Seanasy writes: "Want to follow the construction of the most powerful unclassified computer in the world? The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center will be publishing status updates on the installation of the Terascale Computing System. Right now you can view an MPEG movie of the first clusters to be installed."
Bill - aka taniwha
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Bill - aka taniwha
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Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
Does anyone know if this system will support OPENMP?
Probably. The building blocks are ES-40s, which are 4-way SMP systems. The individual ES-40s are connected via Quadrics, which is a fairly fast (and *very* expensive) network fabric. One way you could write a parallel application for such a system is to break your problem up across boxes with MPI, and then use OpenMP to parallelize the loop structures within the program running on each box. I've written a couple codes this way, and it's not really any harder than doing pure MPI.
OTOH, you wouldn't be able to use more than 4 processors on it using just OpenMP (unless Quadrics does some funky shared-memory-between-boxes stuff I don't know about). To get larger processor counts for a purely OpenMP application, you'd need a large SMP or ccNUMA system like a Compaq GS320 (up to 32 CPUs), a Sun UE10k (up to 64 CPUs), or an SGI Origin (up to 512 CPUs).
"My life's work has been to prompt others... and be forgotten." --Cyrano de Bergerac
Man, this is weird...
:)
When slashdot has been plagued by trolls for so long that a "classic troll remark" is funny because it's nostalgic, now THAT is pitiful.
Who's going to resurrect meept? You realize that eventually Natalie portman, grits, and stoning will all be classics too...
As much as some people hate them, slashdot ain't slashdot without the trolls.
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
I never liked 'terabyte' as a computing term. Just doesn't fit in with the 'million, billion, trillion' nomenclature.
:)
;)
I would like to propose that we redesignate one thousand trillion bits as equal to one Electronic Ton. After all we have british tons, metric tons, even a volumetric ton. Why not an Electronic Ton? When you realize that 10 tera-tera (10*(10^16)^16) electrons actually weighs about a metric ton, it seems especially relevant!
Welcome to the age of the 1 ton computer! Next year I predict we'll all have half-ton palmpads!
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
If Hemos posts any more stories on this bad boy, they'll have to build another one just to handle the Slashdot Effect.
ALG
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
JUST number crunching? Scientific and medical research generate so much data that even this machine would never be able to process even the smallest fraction. There is always a need for number crunchers; they give us insights into the meaning of data (for example, the Human Genome project). Sure, they're sequenced it, but now they have to just "crunch numbers" in order to figure out where the genes are and find homologues in other organisms... but I guess that's not important. Neither is is analyzing protein folding and protein-ligand docking, because that's just "number crunching" and could never produce useful results...
I sincerely apologize for this rant, but I simply cannot stand the attitude of people who feel "if it can't play Quake[III/IV/XXX] at 200 fps, it's crap". (Although I will admit, if it's not Scottish, it's crap!). Computers do have uses for things other than looking at pretty pictures and splattering your buddy's insides all over a wall.
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"To hope's end I rode and to heart's breaking: Now for wrath, now for ruin and a red nightfall!"
What kind of framerate would such a thing give me in Quake??
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
Lex orandi, lex credendi.
SETI is a joke and a waste of computer time. Suppose that some alien culture did use radio waves for communication. Suppose they were oh, 100,000 light years away from us. That would mean they would have to have been using radio 100,000 years ago for us to get it, and then even when we did get it, would we be even recognize it as anything but noise? And if we did recognize it, what are the chances we could decode anything intelligible. Even if we did that, our info would be 100,000 years old. And all that is only if their planet is actually letting any radio waves out. Most of our noise is being abosrbed by the atmosphere, theirs might be more ionized than ours and reflect even more.
What the point? We are probably not alone, can't we just work on more relevant things and assume that there probably other beings out there and be content with that?
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I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
This could make a great Newsreel. Remember Newsreels? The "current event" programming (ahem: propaganda, sometimes) that used to run before feature films in theatres. Well, I don't remember them either, because I was born in the 1970s, but I visited the Smithsonian museum in DC not too long ago and saw a bunch of these. I really enjoy some previews, but sometimes I think it'd be nice to have something Newsreel like beforehand. This "birth of a supercomputer" thing loosely reminds me of seeing some of the "look at the Hoover Dam being built" newsreels. Sure beats reading the infoblurbgraphic in USA today.
Just some random thoughts.
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
Quote from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette "Pittsburgh's terascale computer will use 682 of the next generation of Compaq's AlphaServer computer, each of which contains four computer processors. In addition to a 6-teraflop peak speed, the computer will draw on 2.7 trillion bytes, or terabytes, of random access memory, will have 50 terabytes of online hard-disk storage and another 300 terabytes of additional tape or disk storage"
:)
hmmm... Compaq has shown interest in linux, i wonder what the OS will be? (anything but windows
[Something witty and intelligent should have appeared here.]
{Traicovn}
Just in time for November's Top 500 list. Oh, "scheduled to be installed." Guess not. Sorry, guys!
-Chris
Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of these?
OK, Fire the moderation beam!
-- IANAEG - I am not an elder god.
NSF Awards $45 Million to Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center for "Terascale" Computing
Looking into the future, I can see the next one to be posted...
Project cancelled, following $48 million bill in bandwidth due to excessive setup movie download by 'Slashdot' readers
The Japanese are carrying out an insanely ambitious project,for a 640 node, 40 sustained TeraFlops computer, housed in a building the size of a large hockey arena. They call it the "Earth Simulator" and its main purpose is to carry out atmospheric/climatological research and simulations of the simmering ball of lava we live on (volcano and earthquake research).
Construction is in full swing now; hardware to come online first quarter 2001, software "will take a little longer".
More tech-oriented info here.
Funny how a site dedicated to such a powerful system is now slashdotted and not responding.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Did you know that computers like this use real much power? Like, *real* much?!
In Amsterdam (the Netherlands), no more computer-centers (e.g. co-locations where you can put your servers with a fast net connection) can be built because there is not enough power for them! Level 3 Communications has a co-location building there which is about 10.000 meters square (this is not as big as it sounds, it's just 100x100 m), filled up with ISPs servers and the like. This single building is actually using more energy than Schiphol airport (which is rather big - many trans-athlantic flights go through Schiphol. If you've ever been in the Netherlands you'll know)
They also have a diesel power generator that can power the entiry building in case of a blackout - it burns around 1000 liters (about 250 gallons or so) a day.
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'