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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.
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).
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.
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.
ASCI White