Fastest Commercial Supercomputer To Be Built
Zeus305 writes: "Today NuTec Sciences, Inc. will be announcing its purchase of the world's fastest commercial supercomputer, second overall only to ASCI White. NuTec will use and lease time on the 1,250 clustered IBM servers to analyse genes decoded by the human genome project to try to better understand the causes of diseases like cancer by running month-long algorithms that analyse the relationships between different areas of the genome. This beast will have 2.5 terabytes of RAM and 50 TB of disk space."
The article Yahoo! states Nutec "will install the first quarter of the 5,000-CPU machine this month and the rest during the course of the next year."
The information on IBM's site says that they are using p640's for the nodes in this thing. These run AIX as shipped from IBM, so I would assume that this is what it will be running. You can get more information on the p640 at www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/pseries/640.html
Unfortunately it's a problem of supply and demand. The 50,000 Sony Playstation 2 nodes they're using in the cluster are backordered.
Anything that gets commercials done faster is OK by me. So this is gonna be, like, a really big Tivo?-)
how can it be the fastest computer if it's second to ASCI White ?
2.5 terabytes of RAM and 50 TB of disk space.
:)
Look at that - 2.5 TB RAM, 50TB disk means that RAM is 5% of disk. Compare that to a reasonable system today, where you have 128MB, and 30GB disk, which is somewhere around 0.4% of disk...
What's the point of virtual memory when you've got RAM like that?
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
2.5 TB /50 TB = 1/20
For every one byte of memmory you have 20 btyes of harddrive space. Damn could you imagine the amount of data you can hold in memory to work your magic on. I wonder if that puppy needs any swap space.
You're missing my point. I'm saying that for many many applications, a hot-swappable RAID array build out of FibreChannel or what have you gets you nothing.
If all you need is a place to temporarily stash some DNA input files (which are certainly duplicated somewhere else) than cheap-as-shit IDE
drives are just fine for what you're.
And I haven't forgotten about controllers, cabinets, powersupplies, etc. Assuming 1,200 machines, you can put 40 gig IDE drives in each machine and have 48 terabytes of disk. Use a 2U or even a 1U case and you don't need anything else, other than the few buck IDE cable.
1. It won't be the second fastest supercomputer ever built until it performs a benchmark that proves it. Both ASCI Blue machines are theoretically *faster* than ASCI Red, but they still haven't beaten Red in Linpack.
2. 50 Terabytes of disk isn't really that big of a deal. 80 Gig Drives are $250 off pricewatch, so we're talking roughly 3k per terabyte, or only $150,000 for the disk, which in the high-performance community really isn't all that much money. (And don't whine to me about "Well, super-duper-ultra-scsi7 isn't that cheap" because many many apps simply don't need fast disk - they may very well be CPU bound or maybe memory bandwidth bound.)
That's why you'd have to do some degree of carry lookahead for this to make any sense. But even then, you're right, you may not get any gain in speed because of transfer times. However, with other dynamic problems where you're working on very large 3 or 4-D tables (ie k(n)=2l(n-1)+(1/2)m(n-1), k(n)=2m(n-4)-l(n-1), m(n)=3k(n-2)+2m(n-2)) this makes much more sense.
\forall code \in C, \frac{\Delta readability(code)}{\Delta t} < 0
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these...
Try reading the article.
Think of all the neat new commercials this thing can make!!
_joshua_
I wish Slashdot was more interested in the real science of the genome and less PR orientated. Slashdot aint what it used to be...
Check out5 1
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article.asp?aid=141
Basically, it's a million processor giant that will hopefully crank out a petaflop. I'm sure they're doing reasearch somewhere, but the only thing I've seen is bad marketing crap. First, "Blue Gene", which is just an obvious, stupid joke. Then the article says it will use a new type of architecure called SMASH...simple, many, and self-healing. How long did them spend coming up with words that fit "SMASH"?
Anyway, it will probably be rad when the build it. But then again, any supercomputer built four years from now will be pretty amazing by today's standards.
-B
We need somebody to implement the street thing from snow crash on this baby, to hell with cancer, i want VR!
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I saw that article too a year or so ago. I think it was in one of the astrophysics journals (can't find a link, anyone else out there?), though I'd have thought it would have been on slashdot too.
It really is true (if you can't upgrade the equipment whilst the calculation is underway). Say you've got a problem that would take 10 years to solve on todays computers, and computers double in power every 18 months. If you wait 36 months and then start you could finish the problem in only 5.5 years total! (the optimum time to wait with these figures is a little more, just under 40 months)
yes, you can solve for x - i was not trying to say that the fibonacci problem can't be solved better, i was just trying to come up with a trivial example of a problem that must be solved in a linear/sequential fashion. i probably could have done better if i'd thought about it, but this is slashdot... i try to play by the rules... post first, think later.
(-;
cool page though! can you come up with a problem that must be solved in an entirely linear fashion? (that can't be memoized or divided into a search space)?
i'm sitting here trying to remember one from algorithms and i can't, and it's starting to drive me nuts. (:
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i claim that distributing the adding gains you nothing but delay, since each adding node must wait for another node across the network to complete before it begins its operation.
or maybe i missed something?
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It was "447" (not 437) years of computation time, but only on "traditional computers". Of course, now define "traditional computers".
I mean, to me, a "traditional computer" is the C64, so I am really not talking about a lot of speed...
"Don't mind me cutting myself on Occam's Razor"
how many you can feed doesn't matter. how many could you teach to fish?
Now we can replay all those rigidly linear levels spent stacking rubber boxes in rubber trenches - except now we can do it with a frame rate >20!
How about the exchange rate for an Amercian dog?
Actually, I think the more realistic exchange rate for people/people is 16:1.
Which means, Americans are contributing more to global population problem than africans.
Or more bluntly, 1 american baby born, 16 (or 3714) african babies must die to keep the planet in equilibrium. (as baby-specific political spin practiced by so many American politicians.)
It's ugly outta here.
--- You make things foolproof, and they'll find you a damn fool.
RC5
It would be interesting if IBM would donate some time as a form of charity
Using Moores Law I get about 2024 for this amount of RAM sitting in front of me, based on how long it takes leading edge to make it to off the shelf. ie (2500GB/128MB) = 1.5 ^n, n is about 24. And for others in the know, what would the complexity of the leading edge be then and how does this compare to human neural complexity?
What do you have against Madagascar? I don't think that they have done anything to deserve such a harsh sentence... :-)
~Religion is O.K., as long as it gets you laid.
Since the thing has 2.5 TB of RAM, my best guess is that each p640 has 2 Power 3's and 2 GB of RAM (1 GB per CPU). It is possible that each p640 has 4 cpus (and 500 MB RAM per cpu), but that seems like an odd RAM/CPU ratio for a hefty IBM machine.
dopp
-- If a god of love and life ever did exist, he's long since dead. Someone, something, rules in his place
Shut up, be happy. The conveniences you demanded are now mandatory. -- Jello Biafra
Distributing this across a dozen or so processes wouldn't be that hard.
"The next big issue will be how fast will they be churning out cures/treatments? If this helps speed this up, there will certainly be a great number of lives saved."
Curing of diseases is basically not a function of "speed of investigation" but of politics. We have known how to cure a simple ulcer for ~30 years and yet doctors STILL don't utilize this knowledge. Infact Dr's still prescribe antibiotics for viral based colds which has created huge problems with resistance.
Western medicine is great for acute conditions but totally rots for chronic conditions. After years of study we still can't cure much. How could this be? Looking in the wrong place or in the wrong way. Why can this go on? Human nature. We wont see what's going on until we want to (or have it rammed down our throat).
Answers come from asking a wise question with open ears and eyes.
Damn it, inquiring trolls want to know.
How can I post some tasty bait w/o this essential information?
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
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The msnbc article glances over this a bit, but I'm hazarding a guess that what they're trying to do is statistical analysis based on protein folding relating to the entire active genome. From what I understand, this is a lot like the traveling sales person problem and the whole genre of NP v. P problems that are more suited to quantum computing.
So as our society's tech progress in the quantum computing realm to the point where we can actually build these things, does that mean we get faster answers to questions like those posed of the genome map?
If anyone has any informed insights (not my bs guesswork) I'd like to hear them.
Thanks, -- RLJ
If you want protein folding, check out Folding@Home: http://foldingathome.stanford.edu.
I hate to feed the trolls, but, it is running AIX 4.3.2 the last I knew
....There is nothing a Cattle Prod and a foot length of 7/8" satellite coaxial can't fix/
It would be interesting if IBM would donate some time as a form of charity
I'm sure that they would do it if the following conditions were met:
* There were no paying projects waiting.
* There were to be some sweet publicity for them.
* They could claim some huge tax deduction.
How every version of MICROS~1 Windows(TM) comes to exist.
Do the following really mean anything? SCSA MCP CCSA CCNA
--I'm not actually after an answer!
I don't know about you guys, but this whole "fastest supercomputer in world" bit is getting kind of old. It seems like every week someone is releasing a new world's fastest supercomputer. Think about it, it's nothing new. String a whole bunch of processors together, put a ton of memory in it and build a huge RAID or SCSI disks and I have the world's fastest supercomputer. In another 5 - 10 years we will have desktop machines that rival this multi-million dollar supercomputer and yes, it will run Linux.
Best thing in the world for a hangover. You can buy little packets of pills in gas stations that advertise increased energy.. etc.
Look on the back of the package to ensure that it is indeed B12 you're getting. Pop'em and wait half an hour.
I've heard of a lot of things to do to treat hangovers.. this is the only thing I've ever encountered that cures one. (Along with a glass or two of water.)
-Pip's drunken uncle
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I imagine they'll have a lot of problems with protestors outside the facility, whinging about how disenfranchised inner-city kids don't get an equitable share of supercomputer time.
Jesse Jackson will be there, claiming that the very *nature* of the computer is discriminatory: "Ones and Zeros? That's just another way of saying Black and White! We demand that the computer *always* have an equitable number of ones and zeros stored in memory! And if there's a register that has too many ones, by God, we'll send some zeroes *to* that register. On the *bus*!"
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...i'm glad to see supercomputers used for fighting disease, rather than predicting weather or simulating nuclear explosions.
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think of what all that processing power can do. is this really what we need it to do? raw power like that, available only to those who can construct it. oh well.
The only OS that runs on the IBM SP is AIX. > I was curious - it had been asked - what OS are these beasts running?
Slaps forehead!
Of course, DB2... I really don't care too much about what OS is running - Linux would be nice to extend The Cause(tm), but one thing I've always been curious about is the partitioning of the data in particular.
What really constitutes the data for this job - the entire DNA for some subject? Or is the data collected from several people with and without the disease(s) to determine which genes are likely candidates for leading to the disorder?
Just curious. If anyone has a link to such answers, it would be muchly appreciated.
Thanks
I donate all spillover Karma to the charity of my choice... Ada was still a babe despite what people may say...
so that they can restart if there are any problems. That's a hell of a lot easier than
trying to make some super fault tolerant system.
Flat5
Sure, Red has a good linpack mark. But ask any scientist which machine they would rather run
their actual codes on. The answer is the blue machines.
Flat5
Sure. That's why I said "for the kinds of problems they're running."
Flat5
That paperclip has raised the minimum requrements a LOT! 8-)
Thwart the Corporate Monkey.
Actually I once read that for problems over a certain size you could finish earlier by waiting longer to start, because you could use a faster computer. Not sure if that's true anymore, but I imagine (a beowulf cluster of these) that it is..
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Are there Voodoo3 drivers for this thing yet?
Ridiculopathic Zombies From Outer Space
With Usenet traffic over 200gigs/day this baby oughta have the power to keep up without the meltdowns that periodically plague most news providers. Not to mention some sweet retention in the process.
There's no mention of NT? What's wrong with these people? NT is the single best OS out there, powerful and simple to use. Obviously for a top-notch supercomputer, NT is the only obvious choice for the system. I read about it in PC Magazine, just last week, and as everyone knows they are the defacto standard for everything related to computers.
I just can't believe they didn't mention NT.
</sarcasm>
It's using IBM's DB2 Universal Database.. which runs on....... various ***x's, Windows, and OS/2. So we still don't know. Damn.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
Now I know what I want for Christams !
My current UT server is just not fast enough....
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Take this babe to firingsquad so wa can see how it does QUAKE3!!! YAY!!
a beowulf cluster of hot domineering redheads?? sounds like someone's dream come true...
I believe sex is highly over rated... unless it involves me
well the simulation of nuclear explosions does have some benifit.. from what i remember it was intended to help keep the old stockpiles safe so that we don't all start glowing in the advent that they go off underground .)
btw- anyone know if this thing will do quake3 better than a p4?
I believe sex is highly over rated... unless it involves me
It seems like every time I pick up a newspaper or turn on the tv, there's some idiot telling me that genetic researchers have found the gene that "causes" cancer or some other dreaded disease.
We already know the cause of cancer: carcinogens. We eat, drink, and breathe them, and have since the rise of consumer culture. The same marketroids who have pushed all of this crap on us are the same marketroids who are going to sell us the high-priced cures.
There is a much better use for a machine like this--use it to model human population negative growth from cancer, etc... Maybe then we can get all of the marketroids and GM researchers/investors into cattle cars and ship them off to Madagascar or somewhere...
I'd rather be a unix freak than a freaky eunuch
Ewige Blumenkraft!
Even though I don't agree with the project is is a much better use of an IBM mainframe than a chess game.
"The secret of success is to know something nobody else knows." -Aristotle Onassis
Reminds me of the Hitchhiker's guide.. instead of the Vogons, wouldn't it have been pathetic if the Earth (the most powerful supercomputer in the universe) had an Exception 0E error instead?
I mean, don't they? Isn't that why some major oil company spent 120K on some old pentium boxes and sub-let the multi-million dollar machine IBM was leasing them? The genetic problems they are attempting to solve are complex, they are just time consuming and iterative. Please check out a beowulf cluster before you plunk down more than 100K for a machine to do incredibly complex specialized problems.
NYC - Perl Programmer - Politics/Government/Economics
I'm slowly building a Beowulf cluster made up of Sparcs. I've got two Sparc 2s, and I'm going to add maybe four or five more of these, along with a Sparc 10 or 20 'master' system. Seems to be a good route to take...especially because I saw one just like it for sale on Ebay, and I know I can build it cheaper than I can buy it.
I'm having the same problem - I *really* want to make a Beowulf cluster of them. But I don't feel like scrounging up 6 NICs, installing Linux 6 times (actually, several of them are missing hard drives)...
Maybe someone should start a service where you ship your junk off to them, and they make a Beowulf cluster out of it and send it back? Then again, the power required for running 5 486's is probably about what it would take to run a Cray...
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Just because I'm disabled, doesn't mean I can't get first post!!
I gave up Catholicism for Lent
Do they really have to work on it for over 5 years?! BTW, 1 peta = 1000 tera = 1000,000 giga ?
I have four 486 desktops awaiting ($$ of course) for anyone who wants to build his own "Beowolf" CPU. I just never found the time to finnish the project. Mayagrafix@hotmail.com
Last i heard, wasn't IBM working on a supercomputer to be used for calculating protein folding? If I recall, that was supposed to be the fastest, when complete. Of course, I could be wrong.
"Compute the Fibbonaci sequence (without solving it for x) and race your PIII with this computer - and you might win."
:) -- this assumes of course unit time for computation so solving fib for small numbers is not very interesting. However, for arbitrarly large numbers (say 1 meg integers) you would be much better off distributing the dynamic fibbonaci program (which operates on an array: for(array[0]=1,array[1]=1,i=2; 1; printf("%i ",array[i++])) array[i]=array[i-1]+array[i-2];) and having one master computer which manages the array and the other computers would act as adders (each computer in a group would act as a sub adder and there would have to be some degree of carry lookahead).
Or, transform the generic Fibbonaci recurrence into a dynamic programming problem an solve it in linear time
I guess my point is that many problems that appear to be "0% verctor-optimized" actually are not.
\forall code \in C, \frac{\Delta readability(code)}{\Delta t} < 0
The ASCI series are owned by the National Energy
Labs. The ASCI series are sub-commercial proof-of-concept computers. That is, the mainstream makers are always bragging they can configure a teraflop computer, but no customer can afford them. So Uncle Sam kicks in a few bucks to call them at their word. Everyone wins. The government gets something really fast. The computer companies get an R&D test at government expense. The second customer, a commercial site, gets a more affordable computer.
As discussed in the book Cracking DES chips specifically made to handle the DES algorithm are much faster than Alpha or X86 chips at cracking (brute force) the DES code. I don't know if this method applies to DNA, but my guess is that it might.
Using a similar method as outlined in the book, I suspect that chips that are custom built to understand DNA and how it acts (or at least the inherant algorithms that will be used in studying DNA)are possible to build. Ironically, they probably will not be built until we understand genes and DNA better than we currently do. Once machines like this start to be built, how far off will we be from the machines described in Michael Chritons book Jurassic Park? Some scientists have purposed that it will take 100 years to understand the human genome (or other genomes) perhaps, but I think we are closer than that.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
IBM claims this computer will do 7.5teraflops.
;)
Compare this to Seti@home's 26.11 TeraFLOPs/sec.
Why wouldn't NuTec develope the software so every joe blow and there handheld could run a distributed client that does this. I personally have a hard time justifying time spent installing distributed.net or seti@home clients on all the machines I have access to, as I know my boss wouldn't understand the importance of cracking encryption, or searching for aliens on company time.
However searching for cures to human illnesses, who wouldn't want to do this? With a good piece of software and some proper advertising, theres no doubt they would surpass 30 or even 50 teraflops.
Though this may not be a possibility if huge amounts of data are required for the calculations. Anyone have some ideas about this?
Open Source Time and Attendance, Job Costing a
Here are the specs from a web page I found at LLNL:
- 512 16-CPU nodes (8192 processing units)
- 375 Mhz Power3 SMP processors
- Will have 6 TB total of system memory
- 8 or 16 GB per node
- Will have 484 batch and 8 debug nodes
Data from http://www.llnl.gov/computing/tutorials/jw.lcres/Gene matching is very data intensive -- basically one of the things that they're going to be doing is matching each part against every other part to see where things match. This means having to have a copy of all of the data available to each client. Seti/distributed/etc are really just compute-intensive apps -- they don't need to see a huge data set to do their work.
2.5 Terabytes? Piff. That's not enough ram. Tell those boys to call back when they're ready to play.
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Barbeque is a noun. Not a verb.
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I'm sick of all the money being spent on supercomputers that simply make sure that dollars and cents add up (for instance, VISA's supercomputers). It's heartening to see how motivated people (or companies) are willing spend the doe to solve cancer. My father narrowly escaped it a few years ago, and I wish a cheaper and not so nasty treatment could be developed to prevent it. Others have said, but it needs repeating, that hopefully this will spurn competition in the medical market as pharmucitical companies try to beat each other to better cures.
Lemure, wtf! Don't you mean Lemur?
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Does anyone actually have a Java program designed to control air traffic, or for the operation of a nuclear facility?
Uhh, yeah. This sort of thing is precisely why patents exist. This isn't Linux - biotech venture capitalists aren't stupid enough to sink billions into harebrained schemes to recoup costs by selling hard drive space or airplane tickets.
They keep this kind of thing up and soon we'll be finishing stuff before we start it, and who knows what sorts of embarassment that will cause.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
It would take a traditional computer 447 years to solve the first equations that were constructed, according to Michael Mott, a spokesperson for NuTec Sciences, Inc. That's a long time to wait for the health miracles promised by the decoding DNA.
I'm sure than in only 47 years not 447, that there will be pcs that can put ascii white to shame.
"The secret of success is to know something nobody else knows." -Aristotle Onassis
At last a decent machine for playing Quake 3 on!
The advances in parallel computing today are driven by three factors, as I see it. Marketing, homogeneous (relatively) environments, and Mathematics & Methodology.
:-p
1.) Marketing - Computer manufacturers and systems integrators/consultancies purport to be able to solve bigger/more ambitious problems. Moreover, it makes good business sense to be able to do so. Business got a hit from the crack pipe of information and they got hooked. These problems now fall outside of the realm of national security. Furthermore, government work can be precarious for many companies, and by diversifying their wares and selling to public corporations, vendors spread the risk around.
2.) Homogeneous (relatively) dev/prod environments - Not too many people can claim knowing how to program for a Cray or Thinking Machines box, but a lot of intelligent people can move around in/administrate a UNIX environment, and some of them can code to a messaging interface. For that matter, some know tools like Ab Initio or Orchestrate and can create parallel applications very easily.
3.) Mathematics and methodology have changed - People now recognize the conceptual and practical challenges of parallel computing, and can tailor the algorithms, hardware, and OS to accommodate the challenges of that paradigm.
Seeing random poster's on Slashdot recognize that compartmentalized data and code is necessary for distributed computing to be effective is a tribute to how far this field has come. The engineering has come a long way, as has the marketing, and overall level of conciousness.
As for the new adjective, I would say that wider is o.k., but you have to recognize that a machine does not have to be uniformly wide. I think of parallel programming as a stream metaphore, with speed (CPU), width, (#of CPU's or units of work/data ways parallel) and depth (depth of queue/instructions between checkpoints). How about liters?
~Religion is O.K., as long as it gets you laid.
Well, here's a link to IBM's story on the thing. It delves a LITTLE more into the technical side of it but not much more than the CNN article.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
I was surprised to read the responses and not see any discussion of these increasingly "super" computers' ability to crack strong encryption.
Believe me, I'm not an Area-51-head, but in the few short years after strong ecryption has been widely available to concerned citizens and terrorists alike there seems to be many more huge supercomputers getting built, each with a greater altruistic purpose attached. "It will allow us to test nuclear weapons without building them! It will cure cancer!"
It's wholly reasonable to assume that there are military initiatives to ensure that we can't be snuck up on by PGP-wielding bad guys. As someone not wanting to be blown up, I hope there are, anyway. It's also wholly reasonable to assume that the military couldn't amass the kind of hardware necessary to do this without lighting up some analyst's bat-computer.
But does anyone feel that the initiative could survive being entirely in the light of day? What would the /. response be to an announcement that says "Military announces super-computer initiative break strong encryption in real time, promises to leave private citizens alone!"
Of course I'm not saying that every computer faster than a Pentium 4 is part of an arms program, there are serious economic incentives to making progress in cancer treatment. I just think that we would expect to see the military arming itself with the weapons du jour, and my guess is that a few are probably sitting in plain view.
The only acceptable defense of scientific results is to say that they were the product of the Scientific Method.
That very powerfull distributed systems are starting to become more mainstream. It's about flipping time that companies made use of computing resources beyond their previously wildest dreams.
Estimates of 437 years compressed to 1 month timeframes are awesome! The next big issue will be how fast will they be churning out cures/treatments? If this helps speed this up, there will certainly be a great number of lives saved.
Hopefully though more companies will jumpt to the forefront, and try to outdo each other ( you know they will) and come up with more radical applications and solutions.
I was curious - it had been asked - what OS are these beasts running?
I donate all spillover Karma to the charity of my choice... Ada was still a babe despite what people may say...
Isn't this trend towards faster supercomputers being driven by advances in Computer Science, rather than Engineering?
Remember the Cray Y-MP? Used to be the world's fastest computers were designed to be extremely fast CPU's, built as a sphere to shorten contact length and liquid-cooled. Parallel computing was possible then - the problem was that we couldn't break down the problems we wanted to solve into parallel events.
Today's brand of parallel supercomputers exist to solve a different kind of problem - a problem in which the "search space" can be compartmentalized and distributed- like the RSA challenge, fluid dynamics, chess, and -of course- the human genome.
The thing to remember when we read about ever-faster parallel computers is that, for all intents and purposes, when you have to solve a truly sequential problem (what the cray folks would have called a 0% vector-optimized problem) - today's supercomputers usually aren't any faster than the desktop computer you're sitting in front of. Compute the Fibbonaci sequence (without solving it for x) and race your PIII with this computer - and you might win.
Just something I wish they'd point out. We need a better adjective than faster for parallel computers. They're something else. Maybe... wider.
Suggestions?
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