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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."
Not always.
The switch could be a bottleneck. It doesn't have to be. It all depends on how much data has to be transfered.
I know that with a render farm, which is a NOW (network of workstations) the switch is not the limiting factor. The machine pulls in data, thinks and spits out data, in small chuncks (a couple K at a time). Any switch should be able to handle this.
Also, if more of an interaction is needed between machines, they can be networked in hypercube configs by adding a few more switches.
The backbone can get in the way, but if that is what the limiting factor is, then maybe smaller groups should be used, each working on different segments. Or, more stuff should be stored locally with some sort of smart push script.
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
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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