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IBM Takes #1 w/ASCI White
mcryptic writes "Cnet News has this story about how IBM now tops the top 500 list with the new ASCI White supercomputer. The machine has 8,192 CPUs, weighs 106 tons and takes up two basketball courts' worth of floor space." And it's for Seti@home...er...no.
ASCI White will be "behind the fence", and thus used mostly for classified work. "Stockpile Stewardship" is the official language. Making sure weapons are designed to be "one point safe" is an example (ie - it won't go nuclear if someone unloads a machine gun or a shape charge into the pit).
Livermore just got the OK to put out an RFP for a 70 Teraflop machine for delivery sometime around 2004. LANL is getting a 30 Teraflop machine in about 2 years which will be built by Compaq. (ASCI White is 12 Teraflops).
while i've been waiting for ASCI white to take #1 for a while, I still cannot wait for BLUE GENE
1,000,000,000,000,000 ops per second... that's alota freakin' ops...
"I hope I don't make a mistake and manage to remain a virgin." - Britney Spears
After booting up for the first time, the ASCI White immediately declared that it had to think about the Ultimate Question to Life, the Universe, and Everything and immediately shut itself off.
In related news, a few dozen large yellowish alien spaceships began hovering over the world's major cities today, floating in the air precisely like bricks don't.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
This machine is going in at Livermore - but Los Alamos has already contracted for a larger machine (currently called the "Q" machine) which will be designed by Compaq - installed in 2002 (I think).
This isn't a single system image. There are many separate copies of AIX, each controlling a small number of CPUs. Programs communicate between these systems using a technique called "Message Passing".
Getting on topic, this one's only getting to be fast through massive parallelism, which has definite disadvantages because not all applications neatly parallelise (or only do so to a certain degree.) An interesting question would be what is the fastest single processor (including ASCI's speed divided by 8192) currently in existance. Is it still a Cray? Are the individual processors that make up the ASCI particularly impressive in themselves?
ObBeowulfComment: IBM also make the coolest laptops known to humanity, the Thinkpads (well, I think so. Well, ok, there's almost certainly cooler laptops out there, but they're nice, ok?) A friend got a second hand one the other day and asked me why the battery had so many connections (I have a similar model.) I explained to him that the Thinkpad batteries (this is true) contain a battery to monitor charging and keep the battery in good condition. There was a pause. We all looked at each other, and in unison exclaimed "Can you imagine a beowulf cluster of these things?"
Well, we thought it was funny.
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My wife manages to find all my character faults without much apparent effort.... Perhaps the computer is female....
Actually, the 'female' brain is vastly more interconnected than the 'male' brain. A female brain is an amazing feat of parallel processing. This is why,
But I'm not being sexist... because some men have more female patterned brains, and some women more male-patterned brains... so we're talking generally about average men and women.
So as a general rule to relationships, always remember that from the male point of view, a woman is crazy, and from the female point of view, a male is stupid.... so expect the female to act crazy -- this is just her powerful brain processing greater complexity than the poor male brain can understand. But the male contributes also, by way of his stupid brain, the ability to stay focussed on one thing.
See Brain Sex.
will it defeat Kramnik?
sulli
RTFJ.
Of course it's ASCI and not ASCII. There is such a thing as a joke, however. :)
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You have a few problems with your argument here. Firstly, you are forgetting that at MC (Manchester Computing) they already have some machines on this list like the T3E1200, and so you might find that the combined raw processing power might be a little more than you expected.
:-)
In addition, you have the problem that these machines scattered around several campuses (I've lost count of how many campuses MMU have alone), have real lives outside of number-crunching - students are using them for word processing, programming, etc.
In addition, to say that throwing money at a problem is how you solve it, suggests that you are the most un-employable project manager of any description I could imagine, and I'm kind of worried about how with an attitude like that you managed to get by on slashdot. Intelligence is what needs to be thrown at it, and as hardware costs money, money is kind of neat too. However, you can't just throw a load of x86 chips into a box and say "There yah go! 12,000 processors and I'm sure we could get at least 15,000 GLOPS out of that baby!" which is what you are suggesting. Think about it.
And finally, seeing as UMIST and MC aren't talking to each other a great deal anymore, I would suggest that it is going to be practically impossible to actually get all the Universities in Manchester to do this without a lot of politics getting involved.
I work on large multi-processor machines. Or more precisely, I work with clients developing software for such machines. I have found that regardless of the precise definition, using the term CPU reduces confusion quite a bit. Why? Because the alternative of saying "processor" is very close to the word "process."
When you are in deep discussion talking about which processes will be scheduled on which processors, it is easy for people to get really lost really quick.
So, for ease of verbal (and probably written) communication I find that the term CPU is a lot more clear than processor.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
"Of course that half-pound machine is going to have a hell of a surface temperature! "
Yup....It well take a cooling umit the size of
2 basketball courts to cool it...
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1% - Insightful commentary, such as a discussion of whether big, centralized systems are still relevant today, or whether the rankings in the top 500 list are based on the most appropriate criteria.
:)
You must have rounded up.
For ASCI I think it is relevant to have big centralized machines such as these. They have been/are being built primarily for modelling nuclear weapons to address performance issues that would otherwise be impossible to resolve short of making craters at the NTS in Nevada. For security purposes alone it's better to have one big machine located behind a fence with armed guards than a bunch of machines scattered about a facility.
Of course the performance of simulation codes on machines as massively parallel as these is generally pretty poor. As a rule of thumb, most parallel radiation-hydrodynamics codes are at best using only 5% or so of the clock cycles, spending the bulk of their time waiting on message passing bottlenecks. While progress has been made in optimizing linear solvers on massively parallel machines, it is still a far cry from banishing the question of whether we getting our money's worth out of the multi-billion dollar ASCI project.
It's the Accelerated yadda yadda, not that it really matters. Blue is online already in the form of two machines: Mountain Blue (SGI/Cray) here in Los Alamos and Pacific Blue (IBM) at Lawrence Livermore. Red (Intel) has been around at Sandia as the first of the ASCI machines. Initial delivery for Q (built for Los Alamos by Compaq) is expected to begin in a couple of months. For more information, see http://www.llnl.gov/asci/
Jim, who actually gets paid to use these bad boys.
Learn to spell: nickel, missile, lose, solely, amendment, speech, kernel, probably, ridiculous, deity, hierarchy, versus
If you go to the top500 site, you can now get a list just of clusters (which I think is a new feature).
The ones listed as "self-made" are the most likely Beowulfs. Sandia Labs has a 580 processor system (#84). T.U. Chemnitz has a 528 processor PIII system (#126).
Not a cluster, but Charles Schwab is at #15 with an IBM Power3 based system. They also have a 1500 processor 604e based system at #34. Think someone thinks you can predict the market?
Actually, a government analyst published a paper a little while ago about the optimal slack time, that is, how long you should wait before buying a computer on a limited budget. The conclusion was that you should buy your system when it's powerful enough to finish your computations in 26 months. Any longer than that and you're better off waiting. Any shorter and you should stop waiting and actually get out and run the calculations on today's hardware.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
Yes, 8000 screaming fans in the bleachers of the basketball courts. They're waiting for the geeks who maintain it to vote for homecoming king.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
drat...I was hoping to make a beowolf cluster joke...something along the lines of it not being necessary...you already have more than enough power...I was also going to couple that into a quake joke...but unfortunately, it is too late....(i was also hoping it would be modded as insightful)
does this count as a joke? or is it not allowed?
The anti-salmon
an * ti * cli * max (an'-tI-clI-max): A series of statements in some ascending order, ending with a statement clearly lower than each of the previous statements. e. g.: "The ASCI White Computer: 12.3 trillion calculations/second (teraflops), 8,192 copper microprocessors, 6.2 terabytes memory, 512 RS/6000 375 MHz POWER3 SMP High Nodes, IBM AIX operating system."
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In comparison, the distributed.net project utilizes abut 13 teraflops of computing power and SETI@Home utilizes about 25 teraflops of computing power.
That should provide a bit of comparison between these mega-computers and distributed computing projects.
The nodes themselves are just regular tower sized rs/6000 (ok yes turned sideways) If they are wide nodes and in a standard sp frame, you can fight 8 stacked in a frame. Each fram is say 6 or so feet high and 4.5 feet square (approx.)
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The system is for "apply[ing] science and technology in the national interest, with a focus on global security, global ecology, and bioscience."
So, what exactly will the ASCI White, SP Power3 375 MHz be doing? BTW, I noticed that LLNL also has the 3rd, 32nd and 36th fastest systems. I assume that Los Almos would be conducting simulated nuclear explosions and what not.
Mirror of the TOP500 Site
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8,192 processors, sure, but central processing units?
All this for ASCI!?!
Aw crap...that means I'll have to go pull out my conversion charts. What the hell was the number for a smiley face again?!
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All in favor say "aye"
Isn't that reporter's analogy way off? IIRC, Doom uses ray-casting instead of "true" 3d rendering, which is why walls have to be upright, etc. (I may be (probably am) completely off here; I've never played it, but still...)
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
Six million, seven hundred fifty-eight thousand, four hundred BogoMips. (clock of 375, PPC fudge factor of 2.2, 8192 processors.
What I'd like to know is how much green-bar the sucker eats up spitting out boot-time kernel messages. 512 CPU host adapters to initialize and 8,192 CPU's to calibrate delay loops for could get pretty space consuming..
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Such machines are all very well and good, but there will be serious competition from the Seti sort of model for those things that can decomposed correctly.
...that 10 years from now some kid with the latest Nintendo game will be able to say "a computer like this used to take up as much space as two basketball courts".
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
"weighs 106 tons and takes up two basketball courts' worth of floor space."
With the way things are going, in the future, Apple will package it in a convenient eight-inch cube, complete with cosmetic cracks and a toaster-style dvd drive that will finally run hot enough to toast things.
10% - "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!"
25% - Making jokes predicting "Beowulf cluster" posts. (Yeah, like this one)
35% - Random, (-1, Offtopic) crap.
15% - IBM Sucks, [Company] is better!
14% - "Can I buy one on eBay?"
1% - Insightful commentary, such as a discussion of whether big, centralized systems are still relevant today, or whether the rankings in the top 500 list are based on the most appropriate criteria.
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The most valuable commodity I know of is information. - Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko, Wall Street
Damn that is almost enough number crunching ability to compute all of my character faults and tell me why I am sitting home on a friday posting to slashdot instead of being out on a date.
Papa Legba come and open the gate
"Where a computer like the ASCI White is equipped with 8,192 CPUs and weighs 106 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 CPUs and weigh only 1 1/2 tons." --Cnet News, March 2001
I could fit a lot more than 10,000 CPU's in the space of 2 basketball courts. The connecting circuity must be immense. Or maybe its the cooling system that takes up so much space. :)
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ASCI White
It's all about the coupling.
20000 ordinary PCs could out-compute it.
However, taking into account Ahmdahl coefficients (how efficiently a multi-processor or multi-computer parallelises for a particular problem), and the fact that inter-computer connections would be both slow _and_ very high latency. I reckon:
This thing has about the combined computing power of all the Universities in Manchester[*] combined.
Doh? That ain't that great. It's simply the fact that they've got them under the same roof that's the 'impressive' bit, and I'm not that impressed.
This is a 'problem' that can be pretty much solved simply by throwing money at it. That ain't rocket science...
FatPhil
(In cynic mode, as there are no Axp processors involved)
[*] Manchester, UMIST, Salford, MMU.
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