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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.
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).
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.
--
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
will it defeat Kramnik?
sulli
RTFJ.
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.
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.
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"?
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."
fearbush.com
Finding God in a Dog
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.
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?!
54% Slashdot Pure
All in favor say "aye"
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.
ASCI White